A house in Auschwitz opens its doors to a chilling past

The mother lived for 42 years in a three-storey house overlooking a former gas chamber and gallows at Auschwitz, and would sometimes lose sleep thinking about what happened on the other side of her garden wall.

But the house in Oswiecim in southern Poland, once home to wartime death camp commandant Rudolf Höss, was “a great place to raise children,” says Garzyna Jurczyk, 62, a widow who raised two sons there.

The house, the subject of the Oscar-winning film “The Zone of Interest,” had “security, silence, a beautiful garden,” easy access to the river across the road and, in the winter, space for an ice skating rink, her two sons said.

Alone at home after her husband died, she finally decided to leave. One reason for this, she said, was that she was bothered by people who, after watching “The Zone of Interest,” would wander into her garden, look through her windows, and remind her of her home’s connection to the Holocaust.

Last summer, Mrs. Jurczak agreed to sell the house to… Anti-extremism project, A New York-based group wants to open the house to visitors. She moved in August, and in October the New York group completed its acquisition of the house and an adjacent house built after the war.

“I had to get out of there,” Ms. Jurczak said in her new home in a modern apartment building in Oswiecim, a mile from her previous home. She refused to reveal the amount for which the house was sold, but indicated that it was somewhat more than the estimated value of the property, which was about $120,000.

Mark Wallace, a lawyer, former US diplomat and CEO of the Countering Extremism Project, also declined to reveal the price, saying only that his organization “wants to do the right thing” by Ms. Jurczak’s family, but “does not want to pay” a large premium for the property of a former Nazi, even if We managed it.”

Now the house at 88 Legionov Street, outside the camp’s perimeter fence, is being prepared to receive public visits for the first time, as part of celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of the Soviet army’s liberation of Auschwitz.

the Auschwitz-Birkenau State MuseumA Polish foundation in Oswiecim committed to commemorating the victims of Nazism will host dozens of world leaders on January 27.

At the house, workers hired by the new owners cleared 14 trash containers of debris and stripped off wallpaper and other post-war additions. The property was left as it was when the Hoss family lived there from 1941 to late 1944, including a Nazi-era bathroom door lock marked “frei/besetzt.”, German for free/occupied.

A mezuzah, a parchment containing Bible verses, was taped to the front door frame in honor of Jewish tradition — and to disavow the bigotry of its previous occupant, the commandant of Auschwitz. After the war, Commander Höss recalled how the experience of successful experimental gassing of Russian prisoners in 1941 “calmed my mind, for the genocide of the Jews was soon to begin.”

He was hanged in 1947 on a gallows that had been placed between his former home and the Nazi crematorium.

On a table in a basement corner room that Commander Hoss used as a home office is a pile of torn and crumpled Nazi-era newspapers and other wartime artifacts found after the house was sold. There is also an SS stamp engraved coffee mug and German beer bottles.

Striped pants were retrieved from the attic, where they had been stuffed to plug a hole, and were once worn by an Auschwitz prisoner. Researchers are trying to find out who wore it by deciphering the faded prisoner number, written next to a small red triangle indicating the wearer was a political prisoner and a nearly disappeared yellow star indicating a Jew.

“This house has been closed for 80 years. It was out of reach of the victims and their families. Finally, we can open it to honor survivors and show that this amazing place of evil is now open to everyone,” Mr Wallace said.

Mr Wallace said the plan is to turn the house, along with the neighboring property, into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalisation, a new organization that will expand the Never Again pledge from historical memory to current action.

Piotr Cywinski, a Polish historian and director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum since 2006, said his state-run institution wanted to maintain its core mission of remembering, but saw value in supporting a project that focused on the present and future, as well as the past. .

“The struggle against today’s reality is easier for an NGO than for a government institution,” he said, lamenting the rise of populism across Europe, which he described as a “cancer of democracy.”

The new center would include the entire grounds of Commander Hoess’s wartime estate, including a long, enclosed garden area where he met with Hitler’s security chief, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death’s” doctor, and other senior Nazi figures charged with the mission of exterminating the Jews. Daniel Libeskind, A American architect, He was commissioned to redesign the property.

Libeskind said he drew up preliminary plans that envisioned transforming the interior of the house into a “void and an abyss” — the exterior walls protected by a layer of fabric. UNESCO Conservation Order – And the construction of a new structure, partially buried in the garden area, which includes meeting rooms, a library, and a data center.

More than two million people visit the former Auschwitz camp each year, and, says the architect, they emerge “terrified and fascinated by death” but also needing to “engage with contemporary anti-Semitism and other extremes in our political culture.”

Jaczek Polski, director of the Polish anti-extremism group, which is involved in the project, said he wants to use the house and past Nazi horrors as a weapon against what he sees as a return of extremist ideologies.

“A house is a house,” Polski said, looking out the second-floor window of the former Höss home toward the chimney of a former Nazi crematorium. “But it is in ordinary, uninteresting homes like this that extremes occur today.”

Ms. Jurczak, the previous owner, said she was still struggling to reconcile happy, ordinary memories of the house with its horrific past.

Recalling her family’s time there, she suddenly stopped herself: “I’m worried that I look like Mrs. Höss,” she said, referring to the commander’s wife, Hedwig Höss. In the film, Mrs. Hoss speaks enthusiastically of her Polish home as “paradise,” and is shown trying on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner her husband sent to slaughter.

The commander’s wife, Mrs. Gorczak, decided after watching the film that she was “probably worse than her husband” in her indifference to human suffering.

While awaiting execution in a Polish prison after the war, Mr. Hoss, a former commandant, wrote an autobiography that Primo Levi, the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, described as the work of a “monoton” who “developed step by step into one of the greatest criminals in history.”

The house where Mr. Hoss lived between the two great wars of the last century was built by a Polish military officer who served in a nearby army camp, which the Nazis took over after their invasion of Poland in 1939 and turned into an extermination plant. At least 1.1 million men, women and children were killed there, most of them in gas chambers.

Seized by the SS as the home of the commandant of Auschwitz, who changed the street number to 88, a numerical code for Heil Hitler, the house was returned to its original owner after the war and was later sold to Mr. Gorczak’s husband’s family. Who owned it until last year.

Mr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum, said he was keen to work with the Anti-Extremism Project, in its efforts to combat extremism.

He said that extremism “unfortunately is not a mental illness; It’s a method that exploits widespread frustration.

He added that ordinary people with ordinary ambitions can turn into monsters.

He said Mr. Hoss “was a wonderful father to his children and, at the same time, the main organizer of the most brutal killings in the history of the world.”

Anatole Magdziarz He contributed reporting from Warsaw.