Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there is a consensus to accept this site as zone of inviolability, an entity without interference from political or religious groups or local municipalities. These authorities have their own agenda and their own interests that often intrude and, at times, are contradictory to the dignity that the sacred site of Auschwitz-Birkenau deserves.
What had transpired there did not happen in isolation, in outer space, or on another planet. It happened in our midst. It became possible because of centuries of religious persecution, centuries of antisemitism and racism. It happened because of the inaction of bystanders and the active participation of willing executioners.
The government of Poland has acknowledged the symbolic impact of Auschwitz-Birkenau, both in Poland and throughout the world. They have cooperated in supporting the memorializing of Auschwitz-Birkenau for all mankind.
Yet, the Jewish Pavilion at Auschwitz-Birkenau was closed after the Six-Day War in 1967, at the height of the anti-Jewish purges of the Polish government at that time, ostensibly for renovations. The Pavilion was reopened to the public and rededicated in 1978.
We must, therefore, guarantee that politics and all prejudices never again affect the integrity of Auschwitz-Birkenau and all other concentration camps of the Holocaust. Furthermore, they must be recognized as zones of inviolability, not ever to be disturbed, to remain eternally untouched.
Mankind must be taught and reminded repeatedly of the horrendous tragedy of the Holocaust-Shoah. For Jews, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp symbolizes the brutal destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. To the Polish people, Auschwitz-Birkenau remains an unprecedented historical atrocity committed by the Germans.
This common experience should promote understanding between Jews and Poles. Together they must protect this site and preserve it with the utmost dignity, without disturbing those who come to identify themselves with a loved one who perished there. The importance of the physical conservation and preservation of the historical authenticity of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the international community cannot be overstated.
Appropriate barricades and protective fences must be erected to prevent accidental destruction of ruins, buildings, and grounds.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Preservation Project was not meant to be made into a tourist attraction, a “nice” place to visit, a pleasant museum to tour. The purpose of the extensive preservation of Auschwitz-Birkenau is to ensure that our children and our children’s children, and the tens of thousands of schoolchildren who visit Auschwitz-Birkenau each year may learn about the Holocaust, and not only from a textbook. They should be able to see for themselves the actual place where their grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were killed brutally, pointlessly. The annual March of the Living to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in which Jews from Israel and from all around the world participate, is another educational means for instilling the horrific awe provoked by Auschwitz-Birkenau and assuring the lessons it must eternally teach.
This is not something that you can learn from a book. It is something you must see and learn firsthand.
Elie Wiesel, in his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea, wrote:
I will never cease to rebel against those who committed or permitted Auschwitz, including God. The questions I once asked myself about God’s silence remain open. If they have an answer, I do not know it. More than that, I refuse to know it. But I maintain that the death of six million human beings poses a question to which no answer will ever be forthcoming.
Jean-Claude Presac, a Holocaust revisionist-turned- believer, wrote:
I want people to experience exactly what it meant to enter a gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I want them to walk down the stairs into the chamber, to stand before the ovens and see that this was insane and criminal. I want it to be a slap in the face. You can’t create memory, but you can create an experience that is as powerful as memory.
It is our duty and responsibility to teach the young people that Auschwitz-Birkenau is the end product of dictatorship, a result of hatred and intolerance. Auschwitz-Birkenau must be preserved because it is a warning to all mankind and the whole world. The question why it happened and why so many peoples, states and organized religions looked the other way, will continue to remind us that a stain remains upon humankind for all generations to come.
James E. Young, associate professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has written copiously on the Holocaust. In his introduction to his book, At Memory’s Edge, Young wrote:
This postwar generation, after all, cannot remember the Holocaust as it occurred. All they remember, all they know of the Holocaust, is what the victims have passed down to them in their memoirs. They remember not actual events but the countless histories and novels.
So how can we preserve the memory of the Holocaust once the survivors have gone?
Only through education, and especially by conservation of the barracks, the crematoriums, the artifacts, and the whole entity of these concentration camps, can we preserve the memory, so that visitors to the sites will experience emotionally the horrors that occurred there.
“Memory is blind to all but the groups it binds,” wrote Pierre Nora, the French intellectual historian, in his Realms of Memory. “History, on the other [hand], belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority.” That is, history is what happened; memory is the recollection that binds what happened to ourselves in the present. Learning from Nora, we recognize that memorial spaces inevitably assume lives of their own, dependent on the attributes of those who visit or live in their sacred precincts.
While history belongs to everybody, memory binds personally those who visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, having experienced the impact of the place and sensed the uniqueness of the Holocaust the site represents.
This kind of response to the experience of visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau is exemplified by America’s First Lady, Laura Bush, when she visited the place recently. She said:
Even though I have read extensively about the Holocaust, it is only now, that I am actually standing in the midst of this concentration camp, seeing the victims’ artifacts such as shoes, glasses, and hair, that I can begin to fathom and have a sense of the horrific tragedy that had occurred here. The impact of this experience will remain in my memory forever.
Such an experience, as expressed by First Lady Laura Bush, soaks into the very being of the visitor and is transformed into memory.
Auschwitz-Birkenau can also become an educational and healing place for those uninformed of the history of the Holocaust. Let me quote an Israeli-Arab who recently visited the place: “I understand that we did not understand.”
Even deniers of the Holocaust and all those antagonistic to the State of Israel might find compassion for those who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust. The recent visit of 120 Israeli-Arabs and 130 Jews from Israel, as well as a delegation of 200 Jews and Muslims from France, was a courageous act on the part of the Israeli-Arabs and Muslims. They came under fire for initiating this visit and expressing their solidarity with the Jewish suffering and pain. This visit illustrates the potential for Auschwitz-Birkenau to become a miracle of healing among peoples.
Today, Auschwitz is the largest cemetery in the world without graves. It is a cemetery for approximately one and a half million people, where there is no place to lay a stone or a flower in honor of any victim. It is a cemetery without graves, because the bodies were blown into the sky as smoke. Auschwitz is a testimony to the crimes of the Third Reich for all succeeding generations.
We commemorate not only Auschwitz, but also all the other concentration camps and the atrocities that took place there. When you walk down the steps of the crematorium, you can easily identify with the hundreds of thousands of mostly Jewish men, women, and children who took the same route on the way to their deaths.
Lord Shawcross, who was Britain’s chief prosecutor at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg, called the Nazi defendants “Black hearted murderers, plunderers and conspirators of which the world has not known their equal.”
Remembering the victims is a sacred obligation that we, contemporaries and future generations alike, have inherited from those victims of the Holocaust. If we fail to remember their suffering, their deaths will have been meaningless.
In the death camps and on the death marches, strangers became friends. If anyone was near death or about to be killed by the Nazis, he or she implored fellow inmates in words such as these: “Don’t forget me. Keep my memory alive.”
On October 4, 1943, in Posen, Himmler addressed an assembly of high-ranking SS officers and said: “The killing of Jews is the most glorious page in our history, one not written and which shall never be written.” He asked the SS officers to carry this secret to the grave. Consequently, we have a race between those who vowed and promised the Nazi victims to be remembered and those who vowed never to reveal their secret.


The preservation of the sacred dignity of the Auschwitz-Birkenau site is just as poignant as the physical aspects of the conservation project. When the filmmaker Steven Spielberg received the approval of the Polish government to shoot the movie Schindler’s List on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the decision evoked strong protests by Jewish and non-Jewish segments throughout the world, especially among Holocaust survivors. I brought the issue to the attention of the international press in an open letter to The New York Times. We were concerned that unfettered access to commercial filming at Auschwitz Birkenau would disturb the dignity and solemnity of the place.
Subsequently, Mr. Spielberg was convinced and refrained from shooting the film inside the campsite, but instead reconstructed the scene outside.
By reversing his plans for shooting Schindler’s List on a set inside the campsite, Steven Spielberg demonstrated great moral sensitivity to the concern of the Jewish people and to the memory of the holy martyrs of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Schindler’s List proved to be an invaluable contribution to the sacred cause of educating millions of Jews and non-Jews about the horrors of the Holocaust.
It is also comforting to acknowledge the acts of courage and sacrifice by small numbers of righteous gentiles who saved potential victims at the risk of their own lives. In some cases this involved acts of extraordinary heroism and physical degradation.
But in the main, we unfortunately recall that there was no place for most Jews to find refuge during the Holocaust. The creation of the State of Israel came too late to save the Nazi victims with the kind of power that only a vibrant and totally committed state can command. Realization of this comes as a warning. It drives home a shattering lesson about the vital necessity for a secure Israel. This lesson is an equally important legacy that we all inherit from the preservation of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a sacred zone of inviolability, until the end of time.•
About the author
Kalman Sultanik, Chairman, World Zionist Organization, American Section, is a member of the International Auschwitz Council and Chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Budget and Finance Committee. He is also a member of the Editorial Board of Midstream. The above statement, revised slightly here for publication, was given before the Conference for Conservation and Preservation, Auschwitz-Birkenau, June 23-24, 2003.