In the Polish Film Chronicle archives, I searched for films or footage regarding the Shoah commemoration in the post-war years in Poland.
I found only pieces, fragments concerned with the Shoah’s memory there. In the entire film archive, I could not find any cinematic documents suggesting an attempt to embrace the whole experience with a caring memory.
What about the International Monument to the Victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp erected in 1967, which is sometimes assumed to be a memorial of the Shoah?
It was on the initiative of the International Auschwitz Committee that brought together former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps from all over Europe. In 1957, a competition for the design was announced, and it was to be erected on the site of KL Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The idea of the monument was to be a warning to future generations.
Guidelines framed in the competition requirements defined precisely how this idea should be represented. They ensured that the Shoa was described as equal to the losses of citizens of other nations. One of the five points: “If the monument symbolizes any content, this content must be typical of the whole issue, and therefore should not be limited to presenting in artistic forms the fate of only one of the groups of Auschwitz victims.” Elsewhere in the description of the competition: “The place where men and women from all countries go to honour the memory of millions of people of all ages, of all races, social strata, worldviews and religions, people who were reduced to ashes by Nazism, should be celebrated by a work that is an eternal “memento” against new mass murders.”
Plaques in various languages with the phrase “mainly Jews” was added many years later.
I asked my friend, a sculptor, to perform the scene working on the design of the Shoah monument.
The project received funding from the Cultural Scholarship of the City of Gdansk.
