Barbed wire lines the way to work for Pavlo Savitsky, deputy spokesman for the Auschwitz museum on the site of the former Nazi death camp, which was liberated 80 years ago this month. More than a million people died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp built by Nazi Germany when it occupied Poland during World War II – most of them Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles, Gypsies and Soviet soldiers.
About 850 people work at the museum to preserve their memory, a job with more emotional baggage than a typical nine-to-five job. “They say that when you start working here, you either leave very quickly, because there is too much history, or you stay for a long time,” said Savitsky, who is in charge of social media at the museum and has worked there for 17 years. .
“It helps if you find some meaning in the mission,” the 44-year-old told AFP. Savitsky’s office is located in the former hospital of the infamous Nazi SS. Behind the building is an old gas chamber, and beyond is the “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work will set you free”) camp gate. To cope with the heavy emotional impact of his work at Auschwitz, Sawicki said he put up “a kind of professional barrier” that keeps him sane, even if he breaks down from time to time.
Not a word
Jacek Paluch, a long-time tour guide at Auschwitz, said he had to leave his “work at work” to avoid going crazy. “But this is a special job and a special place. It is impossible to leave the whole story and not take it home with you,” he told AFP. The 60-year-old said he leads up to 400 visitor groups around the former death factory each year.
Last year, more than 1.8 million people from all over the world visited Auschwitz. The museum offers guided tours of the site in more than 20 languages led by around 350 guides. The most difficult, emotional moments for Palukh are meetings with former prisoners. Once Palyukh met a man who sat silently – and did not answer any questions – on a bench with the number of a former prisoner tattooed on his arm.
“All his life he never spoke a word to his family about what happened here. Then he suddenly started talking over one Sunday breakfast,” Palyukh said. “They stopped him and brought him here to tell his story, where it happened,” he continued. “But when he walked through the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate, the memories came flooding back. He shut up again and didn’t want to talk about anything anymore.”
“Importance as Evidence”
Palyuh said he knows when the work is taking its toll. “A sign of fatigue, not necessarily physical, but more mental, is that I have dreams at night that I’m leading groups,” he said. “Then I realize I need some rest.” Wanda Witek-Malicka, a historian at the museum’s research center, has focused on the child prisoners of Auschwitz for many years. But she had to drop the heavy object when she became a mother.
“At that moment, this particular aspect of the history of Auschwitz – the children, the pregnant women, the newborns – I was not able to deal with it,” she told AFP. “The emotional weight of the site and the story was too much for me,” the 38-year-old added. If the museum staff were to think about the history of this object around the clock, “we probably wouldn’t be able to do any work.”
Elsewhere at the site, conservator Andrzej Jastrzebowski inspected several metal containers once filled with Zyklon B, the poison gas used to kill prisoners at Auschwitz. He recalled his anger from the beginning – he had worked at the museum for 17 years – when he had to preserve objects that belonged to the Nazis. “I later realized that these objects are important as evidence of the crimes committed here, and their preservation is also part of our mission here,” the 47-year-old man told AFP.
“Give them a voice”
Jastrzebiowski and his colleagues in the high-tech preservation department are responsible for the preservation of hundreds of thousands of items, including shoes, suitcases, metal pots, toothbrushes, letters and documents. Most of the belongings belonged to the prisoners until they were confiscated on arrival.
The restorers are also responsible for preserving the camp barracks, barbed wire, and the remains of the blasted crematoria and gas chambers and other ruins at the site. This is extremely important work, especially at a time when the number of living ex-prisoners is rapidly dwindling. “Soon, there will be no more direct witnesses to testify, and only these objects will remain, and they will have to tell the story,” Jastrzebowski said.
“Our task is to give them a voice”
When he works on an object, he tries to discover the features of the object so that the work does not turn into a mindless routine. “It helps me think about the owners of the objects, their stories,” he told AFP. “More than anything, it’s the opposite of what the Nazis wanted — to have their memory disappear, to have them disappear forever.”
