Families of Auschwitz prisoners protest appointment of former PM to museum council

A 99-year-old former prisoner of the Auschwitz camp, as well as the families of other prisoners, have written to the prime minister to protest against the recent appointment of the deputy leader of the ruling party as a member of the advisory council to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

Among those to express their opposition to the “politicisation” of the institution are the son and grandchildren of Witold Pilecki, a Polish national hero who deliberately had himself imprisoned at Auschwitz to organise resistance and gather intelligence in the German Nazi camp.

Their intervention follows the resignation of four of the council’s nine members after they learned that Beata Szydło, a former prime minister and now an MEP for the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, had been appointed alongside them.

“We protest against efforts to politicise the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum by an act that immediately triggered an image crisis both of this institution and of Poland across the world,” write the signatories, who include Halina Urbaszek-Litwiniszyn, who was prisoner number 53893 at the camp.

The letter, which has been published by Onet, expressed particular concern that an institution designed to warn of “the terrible effects of the ideology of exclusion” has now seen the appointment of a politician for whom “exclusion has become an essential element of [their] political programme”.

“It is not pleasant for us, the prisoners and children of mothers and fathers who suffered in Auschwitz…that in the council of an institution dedicated to preserving the memory of these terrible Nazi crimes there will be a person who made their government programme out of exclusion,” they wrote.

“We remember the statements excluding refugees, undermining the achievements of Holocaust researchers, tolerating openly fascist organisations, and the rejection of EU alliances, which were created, among other things, to ensure that the history of Auschwitz would never repeat itself,” the signatories write in the letter addressed to the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.

They noted that prisoners at Auschwitz were “people who fought for a free, democratic Poland, one in which every human being would be respected…Their dream was a Poland welcoming for citizens, no matter who they are, what their names are, where they come from and what religion they profess”.

Among the signatories are Andrzej Pilecki, Anna Pilecka and Beata Pilecka, the son and granddaughters of Witold Pilecki. After escaping Auschwitz, Pilecki fought in the Warsaw Uprising and later resisted the postwar imposition of communism in Poland, for which he was executed by the communist authorities.

Beata Pilecka has previously called on Polish nationalists to stop displaying images of her grandfather. She urged them to “read Witold’s biography and reports”, in which they would see that he fought for “a Poland free from prejudices, divisions and hatred” and that his beliefs “did not exclude anyone”.

In their letter, the signatories note that the culture minister, Piotr Gliński, has continued to defend his choice to appoint Szydło to the council. They therefore call on the prime minister to “immediately intervene”.

Following the crisis created by Szydło’s appointment, Gliński has accused her critics of showing “too much emotion” and “unnecessarily introducing a political thread into an institution that should be quite far from politics”, reports Onet.

He said that Szydło has a “triple mandate” to sit on the council: she is from Oświęcim, the occupied Polish town in which Nazi Germany created Auschwitz-Birkenau, she is a “museum expert”, and she is “an outstanding Polish politician”.

However, critics have seen her appointment as part of the government’s “historical policy”, though which it seeks to promote a patriotic narrative of the past. This includes emphasising Polish suffering during the war and highlighting cases in which Poles helped Jews survive the Holocaust.

Auschwitz was initially created in 1940 by Nazi Germany to hold mostly ethnic Polish prisoners. However, the vast majority of the 1.1 million eventually killed there were Jews, who made up 91% of victims. Ethnic Poles represented 6% of those who died at the camp.

A poll published last year found that, when asked what they most associate with Auschwitz, half of Poles say “the martyrdom of the Polish nation”. A smaller proportion, 43%, associate it primarily with “the destruction of the Jews”.

After Szydło was appointed to the Auschwitz council last month, three of its members – Stanisław Krajewski, Marek Lasota and Krystyna Oleksy –  immediately resigned. Krajewski and Lasota explicitly cited concern over the “politicisation” of the council as their motivation.

More recently, a fourth member, Edward Kosakowski, also quit. He informed Gliński that he had agreed to be on the council on the understanding “that it would operate in an atmosphere of balanced, substantive discussion far from the political background”, reports Gazeta.pl. However, “recent events have radically changed this situation”.

Among the criticisms levelled at Szydło is the fact that, as prime minister, she gave a speech at Auschwitz in 2017 in which she described the camp as “a great lesson in today’s troubled times that one must do everything to protect the safety and lives of citizens”.

Many interpreted – and criticised – her words as a reference to the refugee crisis, with Szydło and PiS having promised to protect Poland from an influx of Muslim immigrants. “Such words should never be spoken by the Polish prime minister in such a place,” said former premier Donald Tusk.

Main image credit: P. Tracz / KPRM (under public domain)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.