Guzik Place and Ethics Article

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Ethics, Place and EnvironmentVol. 9, No. 2, 149172, June 2006

Out of Place in Auschwitz? ContestedDevelopment in Post-War andPost-Socialist Oswiecim

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, Krako w, Poland

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years the Polish town of Oswiecim, the site of the most infamousdeath camp, has seen a series of well-publicised disputes over land use around the AuschwitzMuseum. Each of these disputes has featured certain groups making certain claims for theappropriate use of land. The publics perception outside Poland of these disputes has been guidedby Jewish groups prioritising their claims above all others. There has been a failure to recognisehow 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 wiecim (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: [email protected]

1366-879X Print/1469-6703 Online/06/02014924 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13668790600707618


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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 wiecim 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 wiecim 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 wiecim 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 wiecim is not a village (Hooper, 2001); nor is it a southeastern city

(Belfast News Letter, 2001). Os wiecims geography is lost and it becomes Auschwitz

(Figure 2).

Whilst we are not so nave 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

Figure 1. Os wiecim in Poland.

150 A. Charlesworth et al.


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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 wiecim! 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 wiecim 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 wiecims 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 buyout the property rights of every site tainted by Nazi atrocities (Jo zef 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 wiecim are made simply to disregard Jewish sensibilities.

Few have seen fit to locate the particular cases of dispute within the context of themoral geography and history of the town itself. For these reasons, it is time to take a

fresh look at the contested developments in Os wiecim, the other Auschwitz, over the

past 20 years.

Whilst the focus of our concerns here is the case of Os wiecim 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; andthe 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 wiecim 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 Oswiecim

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 concentra-

tion 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 wiecim, see Figure 2).

The town of Os wiecim 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 from7000 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 wiecim 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 wiecim recorded a population of 45,000. The

chemical plant played a central role in the structuring of Os wiecims post-war

economy and daily life. By the late 1970s, the majority of Os wiecims residents lived

in Osiedle Chemiko w (Figure 2). By 1989 Os wiecim 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 andmarketisation 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 post-

socialist 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

Out of Place in Auschwitz? 153


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construction of Os wiecims 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 wiecim, 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 onproperty 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 withinAuschwitz 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 so-

called 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; Orla-

Bukowska, 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 wiecim 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 Chemiko w, theworkers new town in Os wiecim 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 20years, 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 wiecim in particular. In 1971 the original

dedication of the proposed church, which was to have been to St. Joseph, waschanged 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 Krako w 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 wiecim 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 Krako w 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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Chemiko w 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 inOs wiecim 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 wiecim, 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 FatherKolbe, 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

Figure 4. Osiedle Chemikow: St. Makysmilian the Martyr church. Photograph taken fromthe steps of the former Dom Kultury.



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(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 wiecim 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

Figure 5. The Pontifical Cross which in the mid 1990s became the focal point of acampaign 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.



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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 thekilling process nor to house prisoners. The people of Os wiecim 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 authoritarianatheistic 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 Krako w, 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 Chemiko w

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.

Figure 7. The parish church of Brzezinka, photographed in 1993 from inside the formerdeath camp.



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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 wiecim 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 Chemiko w, built around theformer 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 Krako w 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 visitorscould 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 indepen-

dence 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 wiecim has monuments to the war dead of the two world wars and a Red Army



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latter two often being seen as one and the same. But the visible symbols of such actsare 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 wiecim 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 ofAuschwitz and Os wiecim 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 Oswiecim

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

Figure 9. The Memorial Tablet to the British POWs on the day of its unveiling,27 January 2005.



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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 wemay be able to see more clearly how out-of-placedness is being constructed in

Os wiecim. 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 wherethey 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 wiecim 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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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 householdgoods 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 anearlier 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 ofterritorialisation 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 wiecim,

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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of the people of Os wiecim was delivered that same year when he was elected Mayor

of the town.

Contestation at Oswiecim in Post-Socialist Poland

It has perhaps not been recognised how decisive the supermarket controversy wasfor 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 wiecim. 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

Figure 12. The Maja development with restaurant, fast food outlet and parking sign visible.



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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 wiecim 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 wiecim, 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 under-

taken.

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 orsimply 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 Oswiecim(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.9 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.10Another monument to slave labourers was erected opposite the former Party headquarters and the

main office of the chemical plant in 1995.11This 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.12Later reports in Polish newspapers corrected this by referring to the so-called supermarket

(Chalupska, 2000).13Only 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 adiscotheque 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.

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