during the first twenty years following World War II, in Poland, Auschwitz was a site of political and ideological manipulations, where numerous political interests intertwined, structuring and restructuring its meaning. In the early years, Auschwitz served as a symbol of national struggle, but also as a tool of Cold War propaganda, a site of antifascist/anticapitalist manifestations. It is here, for example, that the Polish government staged a demonstration against the Korean War to denounce the
“imperialistic” policies of the USA. And in the 1950s, at one of the exhibits, pictures of Auschwitz prisoners were placed alongside photos of new york’s homeless and caricatures of American soldiers.469 In 1955, following Stalin’s death, nationalist sentiments resurfaced: a new exhibit was opened that again stressed the national, rather than the ethnic, identities of the Auschwitz victims.470 As a result of all the political propaganda, in the early 1960s Auschwitz became a principal destination of school groups and workplace trips, visited more often than Wawel.471 In homage to Borowski, in 1959 Tadeusz Różewicz even wrote a short story, “Trip to the Museum”
[Wycieczka do muzeum], attempting to capture the sheer horror and superficiality of those trips.472 Using Borowski’s deadpan tone, Różewicz coolly describes the stream of tourists wandering the Auschwitz site. In search of excitement, carelessly quoting sentimental clichés and propaganda slogans, they eagerly ask where they can see “the hair.” The trip to the museum doesn’t teach anything despite the best efforts of the guide, who weaves in “the specifics: numbers, kilograms of clothing, women’s hair, thousands of shaving brushes, combs and bowls, and millions of burned bodies, with moral and philosophical aphorisms, quotations from school books, etc.”473
As for Polish literature and cinema during this period, such media was almost solely devoted to the experience of the war, particularly the Holocaust, but often the stories were co-opted by the communist regime for its own purposes.474 The image of the Auschwitz prisoner as a heroic fighter was actively created and promoted in the Polish media as an emblem of Polish patriotism. Many artists, whether through conviction or lack of other options, bought into that story. Marta Wróbel suggests that it wasn’t so much the Soviet propaganda, but the fact that the enormity of nazi crimes weighed heavily on Central europe’s consciousness, generating a group impulse against the overwhelming nihilism and loss of faith in fallen european civilization and in human beings in general. As a result, for example, Polish cinema of the 1940s was “sentimental, melodramatic and full of lofty national emotions.”475 Wanda Jakubowska, director of the film Ostatni etap [The Last Stage], considered by many to be one of the very first films about Auschwitz, said that she “consciously avoided showing the stages of the
final degradation of men to avoid steering the movie into the realm of the macabre, thus instigating unhealthy emotions in the audience. [She preferred to focus] on the heroic rather than suffering element.”476 Jakubowska’s film ends with one of the main heroines, Marta Weiss, who is about to be hanged, spurring on her fellow inmates to keep fighting back. “The Red Army is coming soon!” Marta screams, slashing her own wrists, as Soviets airplanes fly over the camp, wreaking havoc among the German guards. Jakubowka’s film was treated as a national treasure by the Communist media, winning multiple awards at Polish and eastern Bloc film festivals. Many survivors found the movie cathartic; however, many others criticized the film for presenting too clean, too polished an image of Auschwitz life: “Why didn’t Jakubowska show the daily struggles over crumbs of bread? Over one spoon of soup? Why didn’t she show the massive transport of the ‘human mass’ that needed to be processed?”477 Outside the official media, the general perception was that “at the end of the movie, the main emotion felt by the viewer was supposed that of overwhelming gratitude to the Red Army for liberating the camp.”478 It is said that Stalin himself approved the screenplay, which reportedly brought tears to his eyes. Jakubowska herself recalls that “in one of the scenes, the Russian prisoners pray to Stalin to save them. There was truth to it, as indeed some of them viewed Stalin as their savior.”479 Wojciech Roszewski suggests that the skewed sentimental image of Auschwitz presented by Jakubowska wasn’t a result of artistic or ethical miscalculation, but rather an expression of against-all-odds faith in the humanistic order of the world.480 Regardless of the reasons, the tendency to focus on the heroic struggle rather than the suffering and degradation of the victims dominated the Polish politics and culture of the postwar era.481 The story was slightly different with the 1948 film Ulica graniczna [Border Street] directed by Aleksander Ford.
The movie tells the story of the relationships, choices and fates of a group of children and their families, Jewish and Polish, living on the Border Street. Ford’s movie does not have a happy ending, as Ford wanted “the viewer who watches it to realize that the issue of fascism and racial oppression is not over.”482 Grzegorz niziołek recalls how the censorship commission, which was to permit the film for release, had trouble with the realistic portrayal of the Holocaust, arguing that society as a whole was not ready to accept it.483 despite winning the 1948 Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival, the film didn’t premiere in Poland until 1949.
Unlike any other art produced in Poland at that time, however, Borowski’s writing hit with an uncanny, brutal force, perhaps because rather than trying to make a point, he simply presents reality as it was, with all of its horrifying details. Jean Améry, himself an Auschwitz survivor, wrote eloquently about the horrifying isolation of an intellectual in Auschwitz:
In Auschwitz, however, the intellectual person was isolated, thrown back entirely upon himself. Thus the problem of the confrontation of intellect and horror appeared in a more radical form and, if the expression is permitted here, in a purer form. In Auschwitz the intellect was nothing more than itself and there was no chance to apply it to a social structure, no matter how insufficient, no matter how concealed it may have been. Thus the intellectual was alone with his intellect, which was nothing other
than pure content of consciousness, and there was no social reality that could support and confirm it.484
Reason and moral judgment simply failed when confronted with Auschwitz’s reality.
To try to create a social reality that could support intellectual or ethical engagement within the reality of the camp was, for Borowski, impossible. His stories simply are, with all their twisted logic, without any external, supporting ethical structures; they are untouched by moral interpretations, testifying to the barbarism of the human race by the sheer power of their horrifying presence. For Borowski, there is no outside. To quote Michael Bernard:
Borowski’s stories – seem […] almost to remind us that the self-enclosed world of the concentration camp, with what passes for logic, cannot be circumscribed by logic at all, and that there is something outside of our capacity to describe that world, that universe, which also limits our ability to reason those things that we would otherwise believe or hope to be so.485
Like Lanzmann, Borowski too seems to believe that Auschwitz is beyond our comprehension. To make that which one considers beyond human reason seem natural and reasonable must have been excruciatingly painful. In many ways, Borowski’s suicide, by inhaling the gas from his own oven four days after the birth of his only daughter, seems almost inevitable; unlike other survivors, who often found relief in
“a process of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially, of re-externalizating the event,”486 Borowski never found such comfort. He refused to compromise, even, or perhaps foremost, with himself. As Wojdowski puts it, in inscribing himself as the antihero of his stories, “Borowski was an author who had the courage to kill himself during his own lifetime.”487 Borowski’s attitude, Wojdowski writes, was a form of “intellectual heroism” that perhaps “only one writer in a century is capable of.”488