SILENT WITNESSES
TO THE HOLOCAUST
The burnt-out spectacle frame is somewhat of a shadow of the presence of a man for whom this object was so important that he made a makeshift repair by inserting a wire in the place of
a lost screw. This is how Andrzej Jastrzębiowski, a conservator from the Auschwitz Museum, presented this small object and its history during a talk in the conservation workshop's warehouse. This human and individual approach inspired a series of six podcasts, Silent Witnesses of History, portraying various aspects of the functioning of the camp while emphasising the personal dimension of what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
All the recordings are made in the places they mentioned, which on the one hand, is a challenge, but on the other, creates
a clear link between history and the present. At the site of the Red House, the first makeshift gas chamber, one can clearly hear the barking of a dog guarding one of the nearby properties. At the Judenrampe, a railway ramp on the outskirts of the Oświęcim railway station where transports of Jews from all over Europe arrived and where selections took place, it is difficult to avoid the sound of passing cars, despite the little tourist traffic there, unlike the ramp and gate at Birkenau.
The historians from the Museum Research Centre invited to participate in the project talked about the functioning of the camp and its dual role as a death factory and a labour camp and described the fate of Jews, Poles and Soviet POWs. They also detailed the fate of women and children, as well as minorities, the Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses, who did not fit into the Third Reich's model of a citizen and therefore suffered persecution. A separate section was devoted to the fate of women and children at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Standing in a large glass room above the railway gate to Birkenau, from where the SS men had a great view of the ramp and the camp, Piotr Setkiewicz, head of the Research Centre, talked about the perpetrators. Germans who served in the camp rarely personally murdered prisoners and yet were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and often suffered no punishment.
The stories of the objects collected at the Museum lend a human and personal dimension to the camp’s history, which often fades away when eclipsed by the enormity of the nightmare. They are the eponymous "silent witnesses to history" that shed light on the fate of individual prisoners through conservators and historians.
Such is the story of a wooden snuff box carved by Bronisław Czech, an outstanding athlete and skier, who presented it to a fellow prisoner. The small object made from a piece of wood found in the camp does recall not only its creator, the gifted friend who died in Auschwitz in 1944 but also the Pole whose life it saved on the distant battlefield of Monte Cassino in Italy. The meticulous sketchbook, on the other hand, shows the reality as seen and recorded by the unknown author, who must have understood that every detail he drew could be analysed in the future and help in understanding what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Looking at the camp and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, it is hard not to get the impression that the stories of this place, particularly the people who remained here forever or passed through it, are still waiting to be told. As the last witnesses pass away, conservators and historians become the trustees of these stories, often enshrined in small, inconspicuous objects.
To reach the broadest possible audience, the entire project realised by the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe and funded by the Department of Public Diplomacy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland was carried out in three languages, English, Hebrew and Polish. The materials are available free of charge for further publication. Hence, the reportage accompanying the podcasts reached readers in Romania.
A small wooden box. A sketchbook. The portrait of a female prisoner. These are small objects kept at the Museum showing the human dimension of the Auschwitz-Birkenau tragedy hidden in the shadow of great numbers and the magnitude of the nightmare. A new podcast series presents this particular aspect of the camp set against the backdrop of
a story told in the place it occurred.