Block 4 was used by the museum as an exhibition space in 1955 that served to document the extermination process. This exhibition was titled The Extermination of Millions. The visitor entering the first room was confronted with a large-format photograph of a mound of corpses, from the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site, and a group of texts drawn from the sentencing of those tried for war crimes at Nürnberg. To balance what could have been a traumatic encounter, the museum authorities placed alongside it an ‗urn containing a handful of human ashes, gathered from the territory of Birkenau.‘309 The combined effects of the photograph, texts and memorial, it was hoped, would be one that evoked both horror and reverence. This technique echoed the earlier displays of 1945, 1946, 1947 and 1950; whereby votive and documentary strategies were both in play. The difference between the earlier strategies at the State Museum and the displays in the 1955 exhibition displays lay in the increased use of photography to transmit the horror.
309 Kazimierz Smoleń, Auschwitz Birkenau: Guide Book (Oświęcim: State Museum in Oswiecim, 1955), p. 6.
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In Room Two, a map of Europe, with Auschwitz at its centre, was used to show the centrality of the camp to the Nazi genocidal project, together with figures for those killed at the entire Auschwitz complex. In doing this the museum was presenting Auschwitz I as the central site of trauma. An immediate consequence was to deter visits to other sites, most notably Birkenau. The opportunity to revise the exhibition permitted changes in which the stasis of other sites like Auschwitz II-Birkenau was superseded by the immediacy and invention of the displays at Auschwitz I. This process can be seen at work in the decision to display a substantial quotation from Heinrich Himmler as it was enshrined in Rudolf Höss‘s memoir:
‗The existing extermination centres in the East are not sufficient to cope with an operation on such a scale. Therefore I have designated Auschwitz for this purpose, both because of its convenient location as regards communication, and because the area can be easily isolated and camouflaged.‘310
Himmler was actually talking about the development of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site and not the Stammlager (Auschwitz I). Significantly, the words selected for quotation do not include any mention of the Jews. A second opportunity for revision in 1955 lay in the attention paid to the annihilation of the Gypsies, something that had taken place at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photocopies, but not the originals, of the records relating to the Gypsy camp were placed on display, together with a caption that informed the visitor that these records were ‗stolen by prisoners then produced after the war.‘311 The implicit suggestion was that this was further evidence of the work of the camp resistance, which at Auschwitz I had been dominated by Polish nationals, thus further constructing a nationalist heroism for Poland.
The contents of Room Three were framed by the use of a memorial inscription which read: ‗Gathered here for extermination were infants, children, the aged, women, men, people of various faiths, political orientations and social origins.‘ These words established the scope of the genocide, and the opposite wall was adorned with the
310 Auschwitz Birkenau: Guide Book (Oświęcim: State Museum, 1968).
311 Smoleń (1955), p. 7.
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national flags of the victims.312 However, they were not displayed according to the number of victims from each nation, but alphabetically. On this basis, it would have been possible for visitors to the exhibition to deduce that the process of deportation possessed an element of randomness. However, the Nazis policy of ghettoisation and the later strategy of Jewish deportation to killing centres, especially that of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was not a random process at all. If anything it was the deportation of the Polish Christians to the camp that could be said to have a random nature to it, arrested as they were through arbitrary street round ups and at railway stations.
Returning to the display of flags, this method emphasised the diverse nationalities of the deportees, and was also notable for its departure from the earlier methods used for narrating the story of the camp. Then, around 1947 the authorities had exaggerated the image of the deportee as being a combatant, someone who had supported and fought for the same socialist ideals as would be espoused by the post-war Polish political administration. The number of nations identified by national flags may have suggested that not all of those deported to the camp could have been considered as fighters engaged in a battle against National Socialism.
The final part of the Block 4 exhibition showed a large model of Crematorium II at Birkenau. The visitor was shown how it was possible for up to 2,000 people to be killed at any one time within this structure. Once again Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and the experience that that site could have offered to the visitor, had been imported into the space of Auschwitz I. Auschwitz II-Birkenau itself was open to the public and some did undertake the 2 kilometre journey from the Stammlager to the site. However, given that Auschwitz II-Birkenau had been constructed primarily as a place for the destruction of European Jewry, and that by 1955 much of the site was derelict; it would have been
312 The order of the flags was: American, Austrian, Belgian, Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Dutch, Egyptian, English, French, German, Greek, Gypsy, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Rumanian, Russian, Spanish, Swiss, Turkish, Yugoslav.
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difficult to portray that camp as a site of Polish national martyrdom, which was the message that Poland‘s Stalinist regime was insistent on doing and this, perhaps, suggests why for a large part of the Stalinist period, Auschwitz II-Birkenau did not hold the same emphasis for the visitor in the museum narrative as it does today.