Ethics, Place and Environment Vol. 9, No.

2, 149172, June 2006

Out of Place in Auschwitz? Contested Development in Post-War and Post-Socialist Os wie cim
ANDREW CHARLESWORTH*, ALISON STENNING**, ROBERT GUZIKy & MICHAL PASZKOWSKIy
*Department of Natural and Social Sciences, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK **Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, UK yInstitute of Geography and Spatial Management, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years the Polish town of Oswie cim, the site of the most infamous death camp, has seen a series of well-publicised disputes over land use around the Auschwitz Museum. Each of these disputes has featured certain groups making certain claims for the appropriate use of land. The publics perception outside Poland of these disputes has been guided by Jewish groups prioritising their claims above all others. There has been a failure to recognise how far Polish claims are rooted in other equally valid moral geographies, not least those shaped both by Polish Catholic and communist traditions.

Introduction David Smith has argued that all geographies are in some sense moral creations (2000, p. 22) which reflect (and construct) judgements about what actions and events are right for particular places. The imposition of order, value and meaning on landscapes necessarily involves the practice of norms and ideologies, filled with moral content about what is right and wrong. Cresswell (1996) has noted that geographies are constituted from a series of acts of boundary making, or territorialisation, which prioritise the claims of one group and, often, activity over others. These acts of boundary making represent the result of contested moral claims to geographical space (Smith, 2000) which themselves reflect a judgement about who should be doing what where. Acts, events and people that are not condoned (or permitted) within given territories are seen to be out of place (Cresswell, 1996). Such judgements, Cresswell argues, are often based on theorising that takes the issue out of context. Moral geographies are often ageographical, dislocated, unplaced asserted beyond the actual context. This paper explores the construction of moral geographies in the particular context of the Polish town of Os wie cim (Figure 1). This small town in southern
Correspondence Address: Andrew Charlesworth, Department of Natural and Social Sciences, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham GL50 4AZ, UK. Email: acharlesworth@glos.ac.uk 1366-879X Print/1469-6703 Online/06/02014924 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13668790600707618

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Figure 1.

Os wie cim in Poland.

Poland with its 42,000 inhabitants, its ice hockey team and its chemical plant, may not immediately seem familiar, yet it is a site where numerous complex and conflictual representations come into play at the hands of a wide range of institutions, communities, states, multinational corporations, media organisations and individuals at a variety of scales.1 Os wie cim is the site of the former concentration and death camp complex, Auschwitz. This locational connection has meant that, for many within and beyond Poland, the lived place of Os wie cim has become lost, its geography ignored and disembedded. A cursory review of the UK media (using Lexis Nexis) in the last few years reveals just a few examples of this: Os wie cim is not the Polish name for Auschwitz (Boyes, 1999; Huggler, 2000), it is simply the name of the town in which the Museum and (part of) the remains of Auschwitz lie; Os wie cim is not a village (Hooper, 2001); nor is it a southeastern city (Belfast News Letter, 2001). Os wie cims geography is lost and it becomes Auschwitz (Figure 2). Whilst we are not so na ve as to fail to see these slippagesaccidental or intentionalas part of the media demand for headlines, for sensations and for scoops,2 we argue that these disembedded and lost geographies are indicative of a wider trendthe failure to locate the memorialisation of the Holocaust in its geographical and historical contexts, not only through inaccuracies of representation but also through an ignorance of the embedded social, economic, political and cultural constructions which shape the communities who (have to) live with

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Figure 2.

Os wie cim today.

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such memorialisations. Yet inaccurate (and sensationalist) representations feed a dislocated and problematic popular geography of Auschwitz. To use an example we develop more fully below, Supermarket Os wie cim! has none of the impact of Supermarket Auschwitz!; the latter, a real newspaper headline, creates an ageographical and strangely ahistorical sense of location. As Cresswell suggests, such dislocations permit the assertion of taken-for-granted moral geographies and easy condemnations of people and activities out of place. In this paper, we explore the construction of moral geographies through a series of well-publicised disputes that have occurred over land use in Os wie cim over the last 20 years. Each of these disputes has featured certain groups attempting to prioritise their claims over those of others and certain claims for the appropriate use of land in a town with Os wie cims history. While some, as we will explain later, demand a cessation of all development in the town, the towns former mayor has argued that the city would need serious financial help to sustain itself, as it can ill afford to buy out the property rights of every site tainted by Nazi atrocities (Jozef Krawczyk, cited in Scollon, 2000). Such a statement will inspire incredulity in some who cannot understand the consequences of their moral landscapes. Yet this rests on a failure to recognise how far Polish claims concerning the boundaries of the Museum and the appropriate use of land around the Museum, let alone in the town, are rooted in other moral geographies, not least those shaped both by Polish Catholic and communist traditions and experiences. The simple assumption has been that Polish claims to appropriate land use in Os wie cim are made simply to disregard Jewish sensibilities. Few have seen fit to locate the particular cases of dispute within the context of the moral geography and history of the town itself. For these reasons, it is time to take a fresh look at the contested developments in Os wie cim, the other Auschwitz, over the past 20 years. Whilst the focus of our concerns here is the case of Os wie cim and its relationship with the memorialisation on the Auschwitz camp, this is not the only example of such contestation and conflict. Across Poland and the rest of central Europe we can outline the map of hell (Bullock, 1992, pp. 834835) marked by sites of occupation, collaboration, death and genocide; ghettos and absent Jewish communities; networks of concentration, labour and death camps; the infrastructures of Nazismroads, railways, industries etc.; the requisitioning and re-use of local property by Nazis; and the use of tainted materials for post-war reconstruction projects. In all these sites, issues of memorialisation, heritage, restitution and economy collide in property developments, tourism and projects of place promotion [for another Polish example, see Orla-Bukowska and Kugelmass (1998); also see Church (1995)]. The consequences of restricting development throughout Os wie cim on the basis of association with Nazi atrocities and Jewish martyrdom extend well beyond this small Polish town. The Auschwitz Camp Complex and the Town of Os wie cim Before exploring some of the disputes that have shaped these moral geographies in recent years, we need to present brief histories of the camp and the town. The Auschwitz complex was made up of three principal camps: Auschwitz Ithe

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administrative headquarters and the base camp largely functioning as a concentration camp though for a time with one gas chamber and crematorium; Auschwitz II called Birkenauthe death camp built principally for implementation of German racial policy through extermination of Jews, Roma and Sinti but with a concentration camp attached; and Auschwitz IIIMonowitza camp housing prisoners who worked at the IG Farben Buna chemical plant (Gutman & Berenbaum, 1994) (for their locations in the present space of Os wie cim, see Figure 2). The town of Os wie cim is also of German origin but dates its foundation to the thirteenth century (Dwork & Van Pelt, 1996; Steinbacher, 2005). On the Partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century3 the town became incorporated into Galicia as a border town of the Austrian Empire. For 150 years it functioned as a market town serving parts of Galicia and then in the nineteenth century it developed industry based on agricultural processing, principally liquor production. Its population prior to World War Two was 14,000 and it is estimated that from 7000 to over 8000the figures varywere Jewish (Steinbacher, 2005, p. 13). By the late nineteenth century it was exploiting its border location to the full, being the centre of an economic migration racket to Prussia. It was to regularise this trade in humans that the labour camp at Zasole (Figure 2) was built. The latters barracks and other buildings were to be subsequently taken over by first the newly independent Polish army in the 1920s and then in 1940 to become the nucleus of Auschwitz I. With the German Occupation of Poland in September 1939 the Slavic town of Os wie cim was to be remodelled as the German town of Auschwitz. In 1941 the planning and the commencement of the construction of the vast IG Farben chemical plant was part of this process of Germanising the town and the region. With the post-war establishment of communism in Poland, the completed IG Farben plant was taken into state ownership. As a state-owned chemical plant it was to become one of Polands most important producers of synthetic chemicals. At the height of its post-war prosperity Os wie cim recorded a population of 45,000. The chemical plant played a central role in the structuring of Os wie cims post-war economy and daily life. By the late 1970s, the majority of Os wie cims residents lived in Osiedle Chemikow (Figure 2). By 1989 Os wie cim was a medium-sized industrial town, that had significantly expanded and flourished under socialism and more latterly had attempted to diversify its employment opportunities. This diversification and a search for new markets was to be drastically accelerated with privatisation and marketisation in the post-socialist era. Managing Memorialisation: Emerging Institutions and Disputes As we will make clear, the management of the relationship between the town and the Museum has undergone significant transformations in the post-war and postsocialist years and whilst we will draw attention to these key shifts throughout the paper, it is useful to outline the main contours of this developing institutional arrangement in advance. In 1947 the Polish legislature established the State Museum and, following the outcome of discussions between many interested parties, the Museum sites were set to comprise 200 hectares, areas strictly connected with sites of mass murder (AuschwitzBirkenau Muzeum, 2005). In 1964 a protective zone around Birkenau

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(Auschwitz II) was established, the extent of which was increased to 500 metres in some places by central government in 1977 ahead of the application to make the AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Rawecki, 1995a, 1995b). This zone was policed by the local authority. With the fall of communism, bodies and institutions outside Poland were increasingly able to have a say in the nature of the Museum, its environs and the extent of the protective zone, something welcomed by the Museum and the Polish government. As long ago as 1974 a committee of experts had been set up to resolve issues of conflict between the town and the Museum over future developments but in 1990 the new postcommunist Polish government established the International Auschwitz Council to advise on the functioning of the Museum and the ways in which the former camp was presented to visitors. Two events were to change the role of the Council and the conception of the zone radically. In 1996 the dispute known as the supermarket at Auschwitz, which we discuss in detail below, broke out. A year later, less in response to that dispute than the accelerating post-communist urban developments around the former camps, a group of foreign experts, led by Dwork and Van Pelt, argued for a radical extension of the zone. In 1998 the so-called Oswie cimski Projekt (Os wie cim Project), originally conceived in 1996, was finally launched by the Polish government to fund the redevelopment of the road system on the routes in the town leading to the two museum sites (Auschwitz I and Birkenau) and the improvement of pavements and street lighting in certain parts of the Zasole district (Figure 2), all in order to improve access for visitors but also in theory to compensate for spatial policies that froze elements of economic and social developments around the Museum (Auschwitz Bulletin, 1996). In May 1999, the Polish government, wishing to halt further bad publicity for Poland in the international press such as that that had surrounded proposed land use changes around Auschwitz I, established 100-metre wide no-development zones around the two main sites (Auschwitz I and Birkenau) (AuschwitzBirkenau Museum, 2001). The governments proposals were met with outcries in Os wie cim. In April 1999, 500 people protested against the new zone (BBC News, 1999; Dzieduszycka-Ziemilska, 1999). The protestors, mainly local business people and their employees and families, argued that the zoning would discourage investors and job creation and would force hundreds of families out of their homes. The DworkVan Pelt plan, with its massive extension of the land under the Museums control, had fuelled speculation that the May 1999 statute was not the end of the extension of zones around the Museum. In 2001 one in seven of the towns population signed a petition about the threat of such extensions (Sadecki, 2001). Meanwhile in 2000 the International Auschwitz Council had been re-constituted with an expanded remit that essentially would include becoming the guardian of the protective zone around the Museum sites (AuschwitzBirkenau Museum, 2005). The development of these arrangements and investments reflects the growing conflicts that have arisen in Os wie cim over land use, boundaries and senses of the proper. In the following sections we explore two of these in detailthe dispute over the Carmelite convent which emerged in 1983 and continued until at least 1993, becoming intertwined with the so-called battle of the crosses throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and the contentious plans for a supermarket surfacing in 1996 and continuing to the present day. Whilst we make reference to other smaller contestations, these two key disputes reflect many of the major concerns in the

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construction of Os wie cims moral geographies. Together they reflect both the sacred and secular aspects of these disputes; in this they incorporate not only moralities founded on religious beliefs (principally Judaism and Catholicism) but also varied secular moralities derived from commitments to, amongst others, socialism, capitalism and democracy; they are peopled by a cast of local, national and international personnel acting for a range of different institutions and communities who are sometimes common to all disputes but often act differently at different times; they took place in a variety of different locations within Os wie cim, at varying distances from and in varying relationships to the former camp and the Museum, and all connect to other sites obscured or ignored in more well-known accounts; and they were enacted at different times in Polands recent history and reflect these varying contexts, and their wider political and economic connotations. Notwithstanding these temporal differences, however, each of these disputes is narratively connectedeach new dispute is created and reported through repeated invocation of past conflicts and with recourse to already-established myths and moralities. The Carmelite Convent Dispute Perhaps the most famous and longest-running dispute over the boundaries of the Auschwitz Museum, and in particular the use of land adjacent to Auschwitz I, is that over the Carmelite Sisters convent (Figure 2). In 1984 the nuns arrived to take up a property adjacent to Auschwitz I including a building previously known as the Old Theatre (Figure 3). Such a Catholic presence along with Christian symbols on property so close to the former concentration camp caused grave offence to Jews around the world. Protests were lodged through the global media and with the Polish and American governments but also included demonstrations on the site, one of which degenerated into scuffles between Jews from New York and local Poles. The dispute went on for nine years and only through the intervention of the Pope in 1993 were the nuns finally prevailed upon to move to a newly built convent just down

Figure 3.

The Carmelite convent and garden. Photograph taken from Block 11 within Auschwitz Museum, 1990.

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the road. Both Jews and Poles were offended by what the other had said in the exchanges that occurred during the controversy (Bartoszewski, 1990; Rittner & Roth, 1991; Charlesworth, 1994; Klein, 2001). The dispute lasted so long because each party had its own conception of out-of-placeness. The later dispute over the presence of a cross left after the nuns had moved out was but a continuation of that clash of conceptions of appropriate symbols and land use next to Auschwitz. This socalled battle of the crosses was, however, to be even more divisive as it allowed far right groups in Poland to make capital out of the situation (Klein, 2001; OrlaBukowska, 2004). As we have suggested a key feature of all of these disputes was an occlusion of other sites within the wider geographies of Os wie cim which provide important context. In this case, in all the discussion around the removal of both the convent and the crosses from land adjacent to Auschwitz I, no reference has been made to what happened over religious buildings or symbols in Osiedle Chemikow, the workers new town in Os wie cim during the communist era. Then the Communist Party4 and the authorities were hostile to the presence of visible manifestations of the Catholic faith in such a district, echoing similar disputes in other workers towns (Kozlowska, 1997). The parish and the local population were prevented for three decades from having a church in the district. On the present site of the Church of St. Makysmilian the Martyr, land had been consecrated in the 1950s in anticipation of the construction of a church (Figure 2). In 1958 a large wooden cross had been processed from the existing parish church through the old town and erected on that consecrated ground, which was then at the northern edge of the new housing development (Urza d Miasto Os wie cim, n.d.). There the cross was to stand for 20 years, shortly to be confronted by the new Dom Kultury (Cultural Centre), a powerful symbol of communisms apparent largesse and its desire to reshape lives. Yet it was not until 1979 that the authorities even gave permission to locate a church where the cross stood and a further year before permission to build was given. It was therefore just four years after this victory that the issue of religious freedom was to resurface with the protests against the presence of the Carmelite convent by Auschwitz I. Two other significant events were to link decisively events across the town in the minds of Poles and the people in Os wie cim in particular. In 1971 the original dedication of the proposed church, which was to have been to St. Joseph, was changed to the recently beatified Father Makysmilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest who had been murdered in Auschwitz I. In 1982 on the canonisation of Father Kolbe the church took its present title, the Church of St. Makysmilian the Martyr. Father Kolbe had been put to death in Block 11 at Auschwitz I, a block that is immediately adjacent to the old theatre, the building that the Carmelites were now occupying. The successful campaigns led by Karol Wojtyla, the formerly Archbishop of Krakow and then Pope, to beatify and then canonise Father Kolbe thus directly linked events in the different areas of the town (Figure 4). Moreover they elevated events in Os wie cim onto a national and, in terms of the Catholic Church, an international level. In 1979, at the Pontifical Mass in Birkenau, the Pope had consecrated a cornerstone brought from the cathedral in the Wawel Castle in Krakow for the proposed church. This linked the new church to one of Polands most revered sites, the Wawel, and ensured that the church in Osiedle

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Figure 4.

Osiedle Chemikow: St. Makysmilian the Martyr church. Photograph taken from the steps of the former Dom Kultury.

Chemikow was not simply a local church serving the workers of the chemical factory. While in the 1980s and 1990s many Polish towns were to see the building of churches dedicated to St. Makysmilian the Martyr, a powerful symbol of the martyrdom of Catholic people and the Polish nation during the German Occupation, the church in Os wie cim was to have special significance by being in the very place where the martyrdom happened. In 1978, as part of the campaign to have the church built, an urn with the ashes of prisoners murdered in Auschwitz had been placed into the foundation of the cross. But if it was felt important that the Church and its peoples sufferings in the most notorious concentration camp and its continued harassment under communism should be made manifest in the post-war area of Os wie cim, how much more important that it was also done so as near as possible to Auschwitz I. That was the part of the concentration and death camp complex where the first prisoners had been Polish Catholics and where many Polish lay-Catholics and priests, including Father Kolbe, had been imprisoned and died. Moreover, the proximity to the Museum was important in the 1980s because the exhibitions and guidebooks presented a communist interpretation of the German occupation. There was very little recognition of the particular suffering of Catholic Poles in the Museum. The communist silence over Jewish suffering in the Museum before the 1990s is now well known but that of Poles is not so recognised outside Poland. So in the mid-1980s following the suppression of Solidarity, the need to recognise through religious presence and symbols a non-communist view of the German Occupation of Poland was important, and linked to a growing expression of wider acts of Polish martyrdom. Just as protests over the presence of the convent gathered pace, that suffering was further recognised when, in the grounds of the convent, the cross from the Pontifical Mass was erected in 1987 at a spot where the Germans had shot 153 Poles. A Christian cross was now literally casting its shadow over Auschwitz

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Figure 5. The Pontifical Cross which in the mid 1990s became the focal point of a campaign by ultra-Catholics and the far right to prevent its removal, hence the other crosses surrounding it.

Figure 6.

The Church of the Divine Mercy.

(Charlesworth, 1994). To many Poles, none of these presences or symbols appeared out of place or inappropriate (Figure 5). There must then have been a sense of bemusement for people in Os wie cim in how the events over the convent unfolded. Most commentators, politicians and the media outside Poland seem to have taken their lead from the Jewish protests about the presence of a place of Christian religious observance so close to Auschwitz I.5 Those protests had all focussed on the convent and its grounds. No one seems to have drawn attention to the Church of the Divine Mercy established in the 1950s in one of the former prisoner blocks of Auschwitz I that had been converted to housing shortly after liberation. A prominent bell tower topped with a cross had been added to the church (Figure 6). This can be clearly seen from the Museum and clearly heard as

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Figure 7.

The parish church of Brzezinka, photographed in 1993 from inside the former death camp.

one leaves Gaschamber I. Similarly given the acres of print on the convent what is even more surprising, given its location and the original builders and occupants of the building, are the few lines that have appeared on the parish church of Brzezinka. It was opened in 1983, the year before the nuns came to the convent, and occupies the former Commandants office at Birkenau (Figures 2 and 7).6 The building which the convent by Auschwitz I occupied was one that was used neither directly in the killing process nor to house prisoners. The people of Os wie cim saw an illogicality in the continuing protests about the convent and subsequently the cross by Auschwitz I given the continued presence of these other churches. The protests could only be viewed by Polish Catholics as an attempt to prevent them from having their sacred site of martyrdom at Auschwitz I. Yet there are deeper values from the Polish side underpinning the contestation over the shaping of the moral geography of the town and the environs of the Museum. Firstly, it may be difficult for Western liberal intellectuals to appreciate but in east central Europe the freedom to worship where and when you want and personal and political freedom are, given the 50 years of struggle with authoritarian atheistic states, bound close together. A leading opposition activist outlined clearly in 1980 the intertwining of the symbolism of opposition and of the church, reflecting popular faith in the Catholic Church as the true defender of the rights of Polish people (Brumberg et al., 1980). In 1983, when consecrating another church dedicated to Kolbe in the workers town of Nowa Huta in Krakow, the Pope himself in his homily explicitly connected the martyrdom of Kolbe to the contemporary struggles for freedom and solidarity (Press Office of the Holy See, 1983). The convent dispute for the most part took place under communism and began during the period of Martial Law.7 Thus, it was seen as more than a question of religious freedom. The wounds of previous battles were still raw. The cross that stood in Osiedle Chemikow for nearly three decades had partially decayed, almost physically marking the price of that struggle. It was then set into the outer wall of the Church of St. Makysmilian the Martyr, at first facing the once proud symbol of communism, the Dom Kultury.

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In the 1980s and 1990s, with a Pole as Pope, the cross became for Polish Catholics a symbol of the triumph of Christ and the Polish nation over the godless forces of communism proclaiming the latter as a passing fashion compared to the enduring faith. In this context, the contestation over the cross at Auschwitz I takes on another dimension. The connections between these religious and political struggles became still more complex as the so-called battle of the crosses escalated and became hijacked by extreme right-wing elements. In 19981999, Kazimierz Switon, a Solidarity veteran and outspoken antisemite, organised a sit-in on the terrain by the site of the former Carmelite convent, then embarked on a hunger strike and threatened to set himself alight if the papal cross was removed to appease the international Jewish community (Klein, 2001; Orla-Bukowska, 2004). In support of Switon, over 200 more crucifixes were erected at the site (Figure 6). Whilst Switon claimed the support of the people (Bowdler, 1998), it was clear to Polands Minister for Jewish Relations, Krzystof Sliwinski, that [e]xtremists [we]re exploiting the local sentiment (cited in Berg, 1996). Moreover, the 1999 charges filed against Switon for inciting racial hatred were put by prosecutors representing local residents (BBC News, 1999). Switon and his supporters were rightly condemned as extremists by the vast majority of Poles both within and beyond Os wie cim. Nevertheless, many ordinary Catholics saw the attempts to remove the cross as much as an attack on their faith as anything done during the Nazi and communist eras. What was important for many in Os wie cim was that such attacks on crosses and other Christian symbols had a long history in Poland and had occurred in their own town in the recent past. Memorial and Sacred Space amongst the Living This lack of comprehension of the Polish dimension to the convent and the later crosses controversies was to colour non-Polish opinion on more recent disputes about land use around the Museum. In each of the disputes, reference and recourse is made to the past conflicts; past actions and statements are repeatedly invoked and disagreements over who decides what is out of place and what is not flow through each dispute. Though the dispute over the supermarket, discussed in more detail below, and the disco are secular, resting on notions of economic development and everyday life in Os wie cim as a Polish town, they can only be fully understood through a consideration of Polish conceptualisations of sacred or memorial spaces of death and martyrdom. Such conceptualisations are founded on both Catholic and communist traditions and commitments and shape Polish thinking on land use in the town. As we discussed above, recent Jewish suggestions have promoted an expansion of the memorial space of Auschwitz at Os wie cim. This finds no echoes in Polish thinking, beyond perhaps the Auschwitz Museum and the Polish members of the International Auschwitz Council. After the barbarism Poland had endured between 1939 and 1945, any state authority whatever its ideological outlook would have needed to look to the future. Such a desire was even stronger where political leaders were committed to constructing a new Poland focused on erasing the struggles and hardships of two world wars and the inter-war years and on radically reshaping social, political and economic life. In such a context there was a need to acknowledge recent tragedies,

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but if normal life was to carry on, the desire to mark every site of death8 had to be avoided. The geography of post-war Poland was almost everywhere contaminated by Nazi histories; any memorialisation had to be limited in terms of the number of sites and of the size of those sites. The particular politics of communist Poland shaped these practices of memorialisation in a number of ways. In many instances, the memorialised tragedy was mapped out in detail but in communist terms. Thus in memorialising the 1944 Uprising in Warsaw the role of the communist resistance was significantly overstated (Davies, 2003). Elsewhere, even special sites of international martyrdom, such as Auschwitz and Majdanek, were not preserved intact and were reduced in size. That these were sites of Nazi terror and international martyrdom complicated the national politics of memorialisation still further; notwithstanding ongoing debates over Polish antisemitism, these were not Polish death camps9 which demanded memorialisation as part of a process of national forgiveness and reconciliation but the sites of an occupying force imposed on Polands landscape. What was important was not the size of the memorial but the fact that the re-presentation of the German occupation was done in such a way through monuments and museums to link Polands past martyrdom with future potential aggression from the West towards all Warsaw Pact countries (Huener, 2003). Os wie cim stands not as an exception but as an example of the position the communist authorities took on the question of memorialisation. In the case of the former IG Farben chemical works, itself the largest monument to the Third Reich in the region and a memorial to all those slave labourers who died in its construction and daily operation, this meant it was transformed into the state-owned chemical works with its attendant new socialist town Osiedle Chemikow, built around the former IG Farben German managers housing. This was the future, the industrial power base and the home of the new socialist worker in a green town with its array of communal institutions. A small monument put up in the 1960s to the origins of the chemical works and its attendant suffering is all that was then done to represent the past.10 For communists that monument to the Monowitz prisoners was enough (Figure 8). The Museum at the western part of the town held enough of the lessons of the past. It was the same across Poland. At Plaszow in Krakow a socialist style monument was erected in the 1960s and the rest of the area of the former slave labour camp was allowed to become unmanaged open parkland. The monument was the focus for annual ceremonies and school visits where the participants and visitors could easily be directed to look east to their and Polands future, the Nowa Huta steelworks. There was, however, an older Polish tradition concerning martyrology, which saw parochial cemeteries as the focus of grief and remembrance of martyrs and military heroes (Kolbuszewski, 1996). When Poland was partitioned and lost its independence from the late eighteenth century to 1918, monuments to Polish martyrs and national heroes could not be put up in public places. Yet their funerals became overt though coded occasions for patriotic sentiment and their graves in the town and city cemeteries objects of nationalist pilgrimage (Polish Tourist Information Centre, n.d.). Under communism, funerals and memorials could perform the same function. Certainly on All Saints and All Souls Days honouring family and the nations dead could be performed almost as one act in the same ceremony. The parochial cemetery at Os wie cim has monuments to the war dead of the two world wars and a Red Army

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Figure 8.

The communist monument to the prisoners of Monowitz, located directly outside the Dwory chemical plant.

mass grave. In certain cases bodies were exhumed from their original graves and brought for burial at the cemetery. This was true of 11 Polish soldiers killed during the German invasion of 1939, originally buried where they fell along the river Sola but exhumed and re-buried in the parochial cemetery in 1948. In 1990, a memorial to the teachers and students of the gymnasium killed during the German invasion and occupation was erected not at the school, which would have been the case in England, but in the parochial cemetery. When it came to commemorating the 38 British POWs killed in an air raid on IG Farben in 1944, again the decision was not to have the memorial at Monowitz and mark the place of the POW camp but to have it at the cemetery. Interestingly because the bodies are buried at the Commonwealth Graves cemetery in Krakow the plaque is on the outside wall of the cemetery (Figure 9). Both Catholic and communist traditions meant that even in a town which had seen killings in almost every street the acknowledgement of that tragedy was restricted to certain memorial spaces. The rest of Os wie cim could get on with its life without any sense of disrespect. Grief had its place but it was not to blight the life chances of the living. What this means is that there is a strong tradition within Polish society that sees martyrdom as important particularly to the faith and to national identity, the

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Figure 9.

The Memorial Tablet to the British POWs on the day of its unveiling, 27 January 2005.

latter two often being seen as one and the same. But the visible symbols of such acts are circumscribed in terms of size and space. To suggest then, for example, as did the Dwork and Van Pelt Plan for the Auschwitz Museum, that it should considerably expand its boundaries so that the historic remains of the former camp complex could be seen by visitors more clearly was greeted with anger and disbelief. That a town should give up whole tracts of land and people be deprived of their livelihoods in a new world of global neoliberalism seemed ludicrous to the people of Os wie cim where a clear sign, the Museum, already existed to this immense tragedy that had befallen all the victims of the Nazi regime. This was a town that did remember its past and the history of the camp. Although the monument to the Red Army was taken down in 1990, like so many elsewhere in Poland, on the anniversary of liberation of Auschwitz and Os wie cim on 27 January wreaths are still laid on the Soviet mass grave in the parochial cemetery. That grave appears to have more significance for the town than the mass graves of Red Army POWs at Birkenau, which have become the neglected part of the history of the camp since 1990. Secular Disputes in Os wie cim The disputes over the convent and the crosses rested in questions of whose sacred/ memorial space should prevail. In contrast, the disputes that have dominated the global medias headlines from the mid-1990s have been characterised by conflicts between the sacred/memorial and the secular, both in the vicinity of the Museum and in the town itself. Yet what Poles found difficult with the opposition first to a proposal for a retail development and then a leisure proposal, just as with the

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DworkVan Pelt 1997 plan, was the apparent lack of empathy from non-Poles with the painful transitions to a post-socialist Poland. The DworkVan Pelt plan to expand the protection zone around the existing Museum sites had as much to do with proposals for new commercial developments as to the presence of Catholic symbols and institutions. Yet that is the point; in post-war and post-socialist Poland, it is very difficult to divorce struggles over religious freedom from those about economic or political choices. To many, it is somewhat ironic that the Polish struggle against communism, focussing on religious and individual freedom, has been supported by proponents of free market liberalism in the West whilst the emergence of Poland as a democratic society with an economy based on free market principles has been met by critics in the West, seeming to deny Poles in certain cases and in certain places freedom to decide how their own cultural and economic landscapes should be shaped. Perhaps if we were to step back from the particularities of the Auschwitz site we may be able to see more clearly how out-of-placedness is being constructed in Os wie cim. What is normally to be found at the entrance to a major tourist attraction, one with around 500,000 visitors a year? The answer would be parking facilities, places to get food, most likely fast food, shops selling tourist goods such as postcards and souvenirs, hotels and motels. At the entrance to the Auschwitz Museum things do not quite work out like this. One of our interviewees presented us with this alleged scenario. A proposal by the Polish division of McDonalds to locate one of their fast food outlets near the Museum had been vetoed at McDonalds headquarters in the USA; for them, McDonalds was thought to be out of place so close to the Auschwitz Museum. Yet what is surprising about that decision, even leaving aside Polish sensibilities, is that at the entrance to the Museum one is greeted by a large and often bustling parking area, a set of kiosks selling hot dogs, ice cream, camera film, guide books and, until recently, tourist trinkets (the latter now prevented by the Museum authorities sensitive to outside opinion) (Figures 10 and 11). The Museum authorities have, however, for years disguised the fact that the reception area with its cinema, coffee shop, restaurant, toilets, bookshop, post office and currency exchange was once the prisoner reception building. Indeed in that same building there used to be a hotel. In summer anyone passing sees a jamboree of people, behaving in many different ways. This is because the vast majority dont know where they are until their guide starts the tour proper at the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. At that point, the guide explains the geography of the site and asks all visitors to behave appropriately; the gate becomes the moral boundary where behaviour must change. Yet as Dwork & Van Pelt (1996) have pointed out, when visitors think that they are at the gates of the camp they are in fact in the middle and have been in the camp for awhile before reaching that point. What is the space of martyrdom and what is the space of daily life in this area of Os wie cim is difficult to separate out. That difficulty was to underpin the contestation over the supermarket. The Dispute over the Supermarket In such a confused landscape where it is difficult to establish what is appropriate behaviour, the controversy that became known as the supermarket at Auschwitz

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Figure 10.

A typical summers day in the car park of Auschwitz Museum.

Figure 11.

The immediate area around the Auschwitz Museum.

takes place. Across the road from the Museums parking area and the visitor reception is an industrial zone that for over 60 years has been home to a range of light industrial firms and wholesalers.11 Right opposite the Museum was land on which was a warehouse that belonged to Spolem, a co-operative that owned most of the shops in Os wie cim in 1990. Following privatisation it briefly became a self-service shop and then ceased trading. All visitors to the Museum ignored it because it was

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behind a concrete fence. Indeed the Museum had for a long time wanted to move the parking and kiosks away from its entrance and to have something done with the unattractive building opposite its entrance and the scrubby ground that abutted on to that building. In 1995 Janusz Marszalek, a local businessman and aspirant philanthropist, put forward a proposal for a parking and retail development (sometimes known as the Maja Development) to revitalise what had once been partly a commercial site (Figure 11). The Museum supported the proposal because it assisted it in three ways: removing the scrubby ground, providing parking and retail functions for its visitors, and removing this from the Museum grounds thus allowing more buildings of the camp including the important prisoner reception block to be re-presented as they were at the time of the camp. All may have been well but for two things: a mistake on the agreement the town drew up, which gave pre-eminence to the retail function rather than the parking lot, and a translation problem. In Polish supermarket denotes a grocery and household goods shop that is self-service irrespective of the size of the shop. A local reporter attached to a Polish regional newspaper did indeed write a story about a supermarket by the Auschwitz Museum.12 Outside Poland this got translated in to a Western style supermarket or even a shopping mall (The Guardian, 1996; Bridge, 1996), and the shock tactic headlines, such as Supermarket at the gates of Auschwitz or Auschwitz shopping mall fury (Daily Star, 1996) torpedoed the project, enraging the world Jewish community (Boyes, 1999) and sparking extreme reactions. A spokesperson for the London-based Holocaust Education Trust called it a crass attempt to eradicate history (Daily Star, 1996). A spectacle of commerce and the every day entering the sacred space for the first time was painted, echoing an earlier dispute at Ravensbruck, Germany where Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, protested that [n]ormal activities like shopping malls have no place there (The Sunday Express, 1991). In none of these debates was any reference made to the commercial activities already going on in the Museum grounds. Moreover, in a clear act of hyperbole, this small development was seen to be the first step in a process that would culminate in the development of a casino in the Museum itself (Bridge, 1996). In all this, there was a tone that implied that the proposed development itself was an antisemitic act. Such sentiments showed no appreciation that the Poles venerated the Museum site as sacred space. Jews saw the supermarket development as a process of territorialisation where Jewish claims were being usurped by those of Poles. What happened next had the effect of making the Museum publicly commit an act of boundary marking over the supermarket and begin to take a moral stance over other future developments well away from the Museum. This was the same institution which under communism had never, as far as Auschwitz I was concerned, ventured a public opinion on any development, including the convent, which lay outside the boundary decreed under the act setting up the Museum in 1947. The supermarket controversy was to divide the Museum from the town of Os wie cim, and leave both parties suspicious of the other. It ultimately led to the electorate of the town showing the depth of their suspicion of the Museum. As far as we can tell, neither the original plans nor what supermarket meant in Polish were ever checked by those representing this story, in both the media and international Jewish organisations, and the controversy became a global

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phenomenon involving both the US and Polish governments. Given pressure from the former (which included threats to cut off US investment in Poland and create difficulties in Polands path to accede to a range of international organisations), the Polish president, Aleksander Kwas niewski, had little alternative but to direct the provisional governor to halt the building which had already commenced, overriding the planning permission which had been granted at the local level long before the controversy broke. There was no basis in Polish planning law for either this presidential intervention or the action of the provisional governor and to a number of Poles, especially those on the far right, this was an issue of national sovereignty. Neo-Nazis marched into the Museum in protest at the halting of the development (Berg, 1996; The Independent, 1996). What angered the developer even more was the fact that the Museum, through the International Auschwitz Council, began to suggest that there could be commercial activity meeting the needs of pilgrims and visitors . . . within the Protective Zone but only with a change of investors (Auschwitz Bulletin, 1996). Marszalek then began to accuse the Polish government of being in the hands of crypto-communists and Jews. At this point the Museum and the International Council publicly broke with Marszalek as they could not be seen to be siding with such a person nor with far right protestors.13 In this way, an issue that had had unanimity between the town and the Museum now came to divide them. The neo-Nazi march itself also highlighted another element of contestation which came to play an important part in forthcoming disputesconflict between local and national authorities as different levels of the administration took different positions on the legality of the actions; in perhaps a reversal of the expected position, City officials refused to allow the march, especially during the Jewish Passover holiday. But the provincial governor over-turned their decision, saying there was no legal basis for banning it (The Independent, 1996). All involved were losers. The Museums visitors, including Jews, still have to encounter a cluttered landscape of cars, coaches and kiosks in what the Museum perceive as a site of contemplation and education. The town has lost new employment opportunities and new facilities for the people of this part of town. Local politics has been polarised by the issue and the prejudice against foreign intervention and Jews was deepened. In November 1996, 43 graves were desecrated in the towns Jewish cemetery, significantly just after All Souls Day when Poles venerate the graves of their ancestors (The Times, 1996). The far right in Polish politics had been given an unwelcome boost and were to use that card again in the dispute over the cross at Auschwitz I, which broke out the following year. There is no doubt that the protests by hundreds of the townspeople in 1999 over the new protection zone around the Museum would not have been as large but for the dispute over the supermarket and the positions the Museum and the Polish government took in that case (BBC News, 1999). In 2000 the Polish courts finally ruled that the Polish governments actions in halting the building were illegal. Marszalek was awarded 1.4 million zloty (approximately E350,000) compensation plus interest and court costs amounting to 2 million zloty (approximately E500,000) in total (Chalupska, 2000). He proceeded to carry on with a revised development project but with many of the elements still in place. The Maja development opened in 2001 (Figure 12) creating, as even the Museums website admitted, over 100 jobs (AuschwitzBirkenau Bulletin, 2001c). The judgement

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Figure 12.

The Maja development with restaurant, fast food outlet and parking sign visible.

of the people of Os wie cim was delivered that same year when he was elected Mayor of the town. Contestation at Os wie cim in Post-Socialist Poland It has perhaps not been recognised how decisive the supermarket controversy was for the Museum in post-socialist Poland. Because it was the first contestation over land use around Auschwitz since the fall of communism to become a global issue, it forced the Museum to choose openly for the first time between the town and organisations outside Poland. Under communism that choice had not been there. In the case of the Carmelite convent, as we have noted, the Museum acknowledged this by saying that it could not intervene because it was bound, by the 1947 Act that established it, only to act within its boundaries. In the case of the supermarket issue the Museum seems to have felt, once Janusz Marszalek made derogatory and antisemitic statements about those who appeared to have blocked his proposal, that it had little choice but to acknowledge that it was now a global player in the Holocaust heritage business on a par with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. This would be its clearest demonstration for potential visitors and donors outside Poland that the Museum had broken with both its communist past and with a nationalistic Poland, viewed as harbouring antisemitic sentiment. But in doing so and declaring that the supermarket was out of place it alienated many, both in the town where it was situated and across Poland.14 It may appear to want a prosperous town but it was not prepared to sacrifice its status on the global stage and the financial and political rewards that flow from that for the parochial rewards of appearing to be good citizens of Os wie cim. In these disputes, we see the Museum transforming itself from a state organisation with roles delimited spatially and functionally into a global heritage institution, still a state institution but aware of its position and influence and of the renewed environment within which it is having to act. As with so many other

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institutions since 1989firms, localities and other museums etc.the Museum has become a post-socialist institution, drawn into the changing politics and economics of post-socialism and having to rework its local, national and global relationships. Through this transformation, relationships within the town are disrupted and local attitudes to the Museum are revised. Burawoy and Verdery (1996) have written of the uncertain transitions when the old order of communism fell apart. The old rules have gone and the writing of the new rules is a process which tends to conflict. Spaces are opened up for the expression of new ideas and new concerns. New actors with new perspectives can come to the fore and old problems can be seen in radically new lights. Smith (2000) argues that such periods of changewhen dominant discourses, ideologies and structures are overthrown and replaced and when moral codes are no longer such common senseare often marked by moral conflicts. Nobody really knows what the rules are and different groups are making claims to set new boundaries. Conflicts arise and new moral geographies emerge. The transformation of the Museum and the wider contexts of restructuring in Os wie cim are part of this process and it is inevitable that this will lead to more conflicts over land use in the town. Too often in this series of contestations over boundaries it would appear that the moral landscape of the town is being shaped and watched over by institutions and organisations beyond Os wie cim, beyond Poland, which believe they know what is best for the town but which are distanced and dislocated from it. As long as this dislocation persists, then the terrain around the Museum and land use within the town will be open to claim and counter claim about activities being out of place. Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for awarding a grant (Award No. R000239289), so that this research could be undertaken.

Notes
1

It will be clear that we are writing about highly sensitive matters both at a local and international level which when reported in the past have often been misrepresented. To disclose our sources of information from those we have spoken to could lead to opprobrium being heaped on their heads. A number of those we interviewed asked specifically not to be quoted or to be identified even in terms of factual statements. A full table of whom we interviewed can be obtained from the authors. Thus there are places in the text where we have not been able to give a specific reference. 2 It is clear from the common language and turn-of-phrase in the many articles reviewed that they were to a considerable extent written on the basis of common agency reports. The same phrases (and mistakes) are repeated in numerous articles. 3 Poland was divided between Europes empires repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, disappearing from the map altogether in 1863. Poland re-emerged as an independent state in 1918. 4 Actually the Polish United Workers Party, but commonly referred to as the Communist Party or simply the Party. We follow this simplified convention here. 5 However note Jonathan Webbers letter in Jewish Chronicle (14 July 1989) supporting the presence of the convent. Only one letter the following week supported his position, the other three printed

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took issue with him and appeared to mirror the strength of feeling in the British Jewish community against the convent. 6 Somehow in an account of a visit to Birkenau Martin Gilbert manages to confuse the parish church with the convent. He, like so many others, steadfastly omits to use the place-name Os wie cim (Gilbert, 1997, pp. 168169 and plate 9). 7 Martial Law was declared in Poland on 13 December 1981 in response to the growing power of Solidarity, the regions first independent trade union. Amongst other things, internal and international communications were severed and frontiers sealed; schools and universities were closed; transport, telecommunications, mining, power and other key industries were militarised; and Solidarity leaders were arrested and interned. For more details, see Davies (1986). 8 However Webber (2002) expressed the wish to see all such sites marked. In July 2004, Conservative leader Michael Howard caused outrage in Poland and amongst the British-Polish community for stating on the BBCs Desert Island Discs that his Romanian Jewish grandmother had died in a Polish concentration camp (see Wyborcza Online, 2004). Similar incidents regularly draw criticism from Poland and its international communities. 10 Another monument to slave labourers was erected opposite the former Party headquarters and the main office of the chemical plant in 1995. 11 This site was also home to part of the Zaklady Przemyslu Tytoniowego w Krakowie (ZPT Krakow), Polands largest cigarette enterprise, bought by Philip Morris in 1996. Philip Morris very quickly divested itself of this facility, fearful of the sites associations. 12 Later reports in Polish newspapers corrected this by referring to the so-called supermarket (Chalupska, 2000). 13 Only one member of the International Council, Dr Jonathan Webber, came out publicly in support of the development (Rocker & Gruber, 1996). What is rather curious are the Museums statements in retrospect about the opposition to the Maja development. They never implicate themselves in the opposition to the plans but in 1999 cite some Jewish groups and in 2001 international community protests (AuschwitzBirkenau Museum, 1999; AuschwitzBirkenau Bulletin, 2001a, 2001b). 14 This position was further confirmed in 2000 with the Museums opposition to the opening of a discotheque in a former tannery, which had been used at the time of the camp but was well away from the protection zone. International considerations outweighed those appertaining to the feelings of townspeople.
9

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