At last: Oświęcim

Where I am writing from now is by far the most uninteresting location of the entire blogging saga. I am sitting, crammed between commuters and juggling a backpack and laptop on the D6 bus heading from Georgetown University across DC during Friday rush hour. Why blog now you ask? Well, I just finished my first week of the new semester and my head is already swimming. Strangely, returning to the memories of the summer reminds me of the greater purpose beyond grad school and is quite therapeutic.

On Sunday evening (July 15), after a long day on the road, we reached the town of Oświęcim (German: Auschwitz). This is where we would be staying for the next week and where the Auschwitz Jewish Center is located. After our group had taken over the Hotel Pierrot and settled in, we headed to the neighboring Max Café, the only place in Oświęcim still open around 8pm on a Sunday night. Although we had the handy Maciek at our table to translate, our server was least impressed with our loud and laughing group of English-speakers. We should have warned them then, for over the next 7days in Oświęcim, we all trickled in and out of “Max’s” whether for lunch, coffee, dinner, beer, and icecream. While very accommodating, my guess is the serving staff wondered when the Auschwitz Jewish Center folk would be leaving ;). But alas, it was only the beginning.

To begin with, I feel a little background of the town is necessary. Oświęcim has an 800 year history. Yet to the average person, this history has sadly been condensed to 1939-1945, and the Polish name for the town, Oświęcim, has been usurped by its Germanized counterpart: Auschwitz.  As the singularly most recognized name of the Holocaust, Auschwitz equates the Nazi extermination camp; less known is that ‘Auschwitz’ is simply the Germanized spelling for a community of 40,000 people today. Ironically, the name ‘Auschwitz’ has also replaced the rich Jewish history of the town.  Jews first settled in Oświęcim (Yiddish: Oshpitsin) during the 15th century, and 7,000 Jews (more than half of the population) lived there by the beginning of World War II and were and integral (if not main) part of the town’s traditions and economy. Most of Oświęcim’s Jews were killed in the Holocaust and today no Jews live there.

In recent years, public officials have tried vigorously to separate Oświęcim, the town (with all its history, cultural heritage and traditions), from Auschwitz, the camp. Yet to what extent should they be separate entities? Should the town (representative of hundreds of Polish towns) also be scrutinized for its role in the Holocaust or should its story, as historian Simon Bronner aptly described, continue to “escape public notice”? In 2000, Fred Schwartz, founder of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, reported that a “major issue is how to preserve the sanctity of the camps along with the requirements of a significant population trying to live respectable lives and feeling that they are bearing the burden of a past that they did not take part in.”  Although I would say that the most heated discussions of the above-mentioned debate are over, issues still remain over Jewish and Polish memory of what happened, the presence of crosses at Auschwitz, and the ways in which outside (most likely uninformed) visitors negatively view Oświęcim, to name a few. As representatives of the Auschwitz Jewish Center we had a lot to learn and discuss over the next several days.

View of  Oświęcim from my balcony window (to the left).

View to the right of balcony.