Robert Jan Van Pelt and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski: Should Auschwitz be left to decay?
On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, two experts on Auschwitz argue for and against the idea that the former Nazi death camp should be allowed to crumble away.
Historian Robert Jan Van Pelt says that once the last survivor has died it should be left for nature to reclaim, and eventually forgotten.
But former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, once an inmate, says Auschwitz must be preserved to bear witness to the fate of its victims.
Jan Van Pelt: Many Auschwitz survivors have told me that a visit to the camp can teach little to those who were not imprisoned there.
Their view is best summarised in the text of Alain Resnais' celebrated movie Night and Fog (1955), written by the camp survivor Jean Cayrol. As the camera pans across the empty barracks, the narrator warns the viewer that these remains do not reveal the wartime reality of "endless, uninterrupted fear". The barracks offer no more than "the shell, the shadow".
Should the world marshal enormous resources to preserve empty shells and faint shadows?
Certainly, as long as there are survivors who desire to return to the place of their suffering, it is appropriate that whatever remains of the camps is preserved.
Many of the same survivors who have told me that I can derive little knowledge from a visit to the camp acknowledge that it was good for them to return to the place, anchoring an all-encompassing nightmare back to a particular place.
The world owes it to them not to close such an opportunity for a return. As long as one survivor is still alive, the remains of the camp should remain available.
But what when there are no survivors left? In his autobiographical novel The Long Voyage (1963), former Buchenwald inmate Jorge Semprun considered what ought to happen with the remains of that camp after the death of the last survivor, "when there will no longer be any real memory of this, only the memory of memories related by those who will never know (as one knows the acidity of a lemon, the feel of wool, the softness of a shoulder) what all this really was."
Semprun hoped that grass, roots and brambles would be allowed to take over the camp, destroying the remainder of the fences, barracks and crematorium, effacing "this camp constructed by men".
As we commemorate the 64th anniversary of the arrival of the Red Army at the gates of Auschwitz - the term "liberation" is not really appropriate as most of the inmates had been evacuated a few days earlier in death marches - it is good to begin thinking about the future first anniversary of the day when the last Auschwitz survivor has died.
It might be that we will agree that the best way to honour those who were murdered in the camp and those who survived is by sealing it from the world, allowing grass, roots and brambles to cover, undermine and finally efface that most unnatural creation of Man.
At that future date, may the slowly crumbling debris of decay suggest the final erasure of memory.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski: The only people with a full and undeniable right to decide the future of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial are the hundreds of thousands murdered in this concentration camp.
The prisoners whom I met as prisoner number 4427, when I was detained in Auschwitz between September 1940 and April 1941, are among them.
To some I owe my survival. They saved me, guided not only by the impulse of the heart, which was heroic at the time. They also believed that the survivors will bear witness to the tragedy which in Auschwitz-Birkenau became the fate of so many Europeans.
Thus I and numerous former prisoners fulfil the testament of the victims and convey to subsequent generations the truth about those days.
But the moment when there will be no more eyewitnesses left is inexorably approaching. What remains is the belief that when the people are gone, "the stones will cry out"...
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Historian Robert Jan Van Pelt says that once the last survivor has died it should be left for nature to reclaim, and eventually forgotten.
But former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, once an inmate, says Auschwitz must be preserved to bear witness to the fate of its victims.
Jan Van Pelt: Many Auschwitz survivors have told me that a visit to the camp can teach little to those who were not imprisoned there.
Their view is best summarised in the text of Alain Resnais' celebrated movie Night and Fog (1955), written by the camp survivor Jean Cayrol. As the camera pans across the empty barracks, the narrator warns the viewer that these remains do not reveal the wartime reality of "endless, uninterrupted fear". The barracks offer no more than "the shell, the shadow".
Should the world marshal enormous resources to preserve empty shells and faint shadows?
Certainly, as long as there are survivors who desire to return to the place of their suffering, it is appropriate that whatever remains of the camps is preserved.
Many of the same survivors who have told me that I can derive little knowledge from a visit to the camp acknowledge that it was good for them to return to the place, anchoring an all-encompassing nightmare back to a particular place.
The world owes it to them not to close such an opportunity for a return. As long as one survivor is still alive, the remains of the camp should remain available.
But what when there are no survivors left? In his autobiographical novel The Long Voyage (1963), former Buchenwald inmate Jorge Semprun considered what ought to happen with the remains of that camp after the death of the last survivor, "when there will no longer be any real memory of this, only the memory of memories related by those who will never know (as one knows the acidity of a lemon, the feel of wool, the softness of a shoulder) what all this really was."
Semprun hoped that grass, roots and brambles would be allowed to take over the camp, destroying the remainder of the fences, barracks and crematorium, effacing "this camp constructed by men".
As we commemorate the 64th anniversary of the arrival of the Red Army at the gates of Auschwitz - the term "liberation" is not really appropriate as most of the inmates had been evacuated a few days earlier in death marches - it is good to begin thinking about the future first anniversary of the day when the last Auschwitz survivor has died.
It might be that we will agree that the best way to honour those who were murdered in the camp and those who survived is by sealing it from the world, allowing grass, roots and brambles to cover, undermine and finally efface that most unnatural creation of Man.
At that future date, may the slowly crumbling debris of decay suggest the final erasure of memory.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski: The only people with a full and undeniable right to decide the future of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial are the hundreds of thousands murdered in this concentration camp.
The prisoners whom I met as prisoner number 4427, when I was detained in Auschwitz between September 1940 and April 1941, are among them.
To some I owe my survival. They saved me, guided not only by the impulse of the heart, which was heroic at the time. They also believed that the survivors will bear witness to the tragedy which in Auschwitz-Birkenau became the fate of so many Europeans.
Thus I and numerous former prisoners fulfil the testament of the victims and convey to subsequent generations the truth about those days.
But the moment when there will be no more eyewitnesses left is inexorably approaching. What remains is the belief that when the people are gone, "the stones will cry out"...