Facts on Oswiecim, Poland
Polish town home to the Auschwitz concentration camp
The Nazi holocaust hands over this town in Southern Silesia. How can you build a nightclub near the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum or move on?
Oswiecim is an uncomfortable two hour train journey away from the popular tourist city of Krakow, and it lies in a heavily industrial area of Southern Poland. Oswiecim itself, though, is beset by unemployment as it struggles to combine the necessary respect for history and the need to bring the city back to life again.
The awkward moral clash was highlighted in 2000 after a nightclub opened just over a mile away from the site of the camp. The System club, built on the site where the camp’s victims had their clothes and luggage sorted, provoked anger from Jewish groups and Holocaust survivors. Featuring semi-nude dancers and wet T-shirt contests, the club’s owners were branded as tasteless.
Even the Polish government, usually sympathetic to the need to regenerate towns where the death camps were based, attacked System. It issued a terse statement saying places of amusement should not be situated at areas marked with the suffering of the inmates of former death and concentration camps.
It is not the first time there has been controversy over commercial activity in the city. In 1996, plans for a shopping centre near the former camp had to be withdrawn after protests from Jewish groups.
Separating Auschwitz the death camp from Oswiecim the city is a nigh-on impossible task though. Every year, over half a million people visit the museum on the site of the camp itself. Because it is the only camp the Nazis did not manage to destroy the majority of, it has become the most infamous, and by far the most visited. Anyone trying to promote other attractions in the city is fighting a losing battle.
Guidebooks try to avoid over-emphasis on the camp, preferring to concentrate on the general history of the town. It’s a history that cannot help being overshadowed though.
Historically there has always been a large Jewish population in Oswiecim. The first Jewish settlements started in the 15th century, and by the time of the second World War, over half of the city’s 14,000 population was of Jewish origin.
The camp was set up under the orders of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler in 1940. The site was chosen because the Nazis no longer had any space in any prisons in the area in which to house Polish prisoners. They decided to utilise the Polish army barracks in Oswiecim, which since the occupation of Poland, had been in disuse. In early 1942, however, it became the largest of the death camps. By this stage the Nazis were beginning to put into action “The Final Solution” – the mass extermination of Jews. Auchwitz was extended over three main sites (the original site plus nearby Birkenau and Monowitz) and 40 sub-sites.
Being in almost the exact centre of Nazi-occupied Europe, Jews, homosexuals, Communists and political enemies were transported to the main camp before being worked and starved to death, or being gassed with Zyklon B in the Birkenau gas chambers.
Since the fall of the Nazi regime, the city has struggled. Under Communist rule, the city’s main employer – a chemical works – failed to keep up with modern technology, and since 1989 over 10,000 jobs have been lost at the plant. With seemingly no other alternative to cultivating a grizzly tourist trade, Oswiecim is finding its past increasingly difficult to escape.
