I - You are now almost at the end of your second return to Auschwitz. What comes to your mind?

photo: Jerry Bauer

PL - Many things come to mind. One is this: it bothers me a bit that the Polish people, the Polish government, appropriated Auschwitz, made it into the place of the Polish nation's martyrdom. In fact it has been so, in the first years, in '41 and '42; But later with the making of Birkenau, of the gas chambers and the ovens... it became most of all the institutionalized place for the destruction of Jewish people, and this is not denied - we have seen, there is also the block-museum of the Jews, as there is that of the Italians, the French, the Dutch, and so on. But this striking fact, that at Auschwitz the greatest majority of victims were the Jews, and only part Polish... this fact is not denied, but sort of bracketed.

---