Auschwitz: History, Place, and People; An Academic Guide to the Camp Complex

Considering the unflagging interest in the Holocaust among North American college and university students, which is demonstrated by the number of courses offered on this topic every academic year at a variety of institutions of higher learning, a textbook providing scholarly yet reader-accessible information about the Auschwitz camp complex is a timely publication. After all, for many, Auschwitz remains not just a memorial and a symbol, but also a shorthand for genocide. The introduction to the volume explains that Auschwitz: History, Place, and People and its multimedia component available on the book's website resulted from a long-standing relationship between the historians of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and some faculty as well as students from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who for the past ten years had an opportunity to participate in the “Witnessing Auschwitz” study abroad program. According to the editors, their goal was not a broad and comprehensive publication about the camp, but rather a targeted response to the “themes and topics that have evoked deep interest among Canadian students with multicultural backgrounds and who sometimes have their own personal or family experience of genocide” (p. 10). Such a thought-provoking transatlantic link considered by Tricia Logan, one of the student participants, connects the book's topic to settler colonialism in Canada and the settler-colonial genocide perpetrated in First Nations, Métis, and Innuit populations. In “Taking the Story Far Away, to a New Home,” Logan, an author with First Nations’ roots, develops a thoughtful proposition to broaden the discussion of Auschwitz to include people who have no obvious links to the Holocaust or Auschwitz.The book's nineteen fairly brief chapters represent the research of more than a dozen authors and clearly reflect the authors’ organizational concepts while they address the educational needs of North American readers. They carefully built a detailed picture of Auschwitz, starting from the level of historical knowledge represented by their college-student audience and employ multiple vantage points, such as temporal, spatial, social, psychological, economical, and so on, to enable a nuanced and multilayered understanding of the camp. The authors shun facile explanations but use detailed information from the museum's archives, such as dates of transports, numbers of prisoners registered as well as estimates of the numbers of prisoners killed immediately after the arrival, connections with German industry, and the chaotic organization of the camp, to underscore the complexity of the Auschwitz “enterprise” and suggest the areas that require further research. Fairly short chapters represent best pedagogical practices and will work very well as separate reading assignments, inspirations for classroom discussions, and extended prompts for research writing, especially because each chapter is followed by lists of additional sources.The book begins with a solid, yet succinct, historical grounding in world history of the first half of the twentieth century, which highlights the factors that eventually led to the construction of places like Auschwitz and provides crucial information for understanding the Nazi extermination plans. Some of the book's chapters discuss research up until now known only to Polish-language readers. For example, Teresa Wontor-Cichy, who writes about medical experiments in Auschwitz, claims that “the medical history of Auschwitz as a whole . . . has been understudied” (p. 123). Wontor-Cichy presents important postwar studies focused on Mengele's experiments. The findings of these studies conducted by Polish medical doctors were published originally in Polish-language journals and had not been well known abroad. “Women in Auschwitz,” by Bożena Karwowska and Wanda Witek-Malicka, looks at the gendered experience of women prisoners in the camp. Karwowska and Witek-Malicka deploy the current analytical approaches developed by feminist studies, gender studies, and memory studies to consider women's spaces in Auschwitz, not limiting their analysis exclusively to prisoners, but also paying close attention to German women employed in the camp. They outline the challenges of studying the “relations between the female SS staff and female prisoners” (p. 106) if one considers feminist discourse. Adelina Hetnar-Michaldo makes readers aware of the complicated politics of historical memory and the political agendas that often influence or even interfere with the narratives presented by the museum's exhibitions. Some other chapters worthy of close attention include “Unstereotyping Knowledge about Auschwitz,” “Expulsions, Bystanders, the City of Oświęcim,” “Space and Narration,” and “Remnants of the Nazi Past.” In all nineteen chapters, authors are able to present a nuanced picture of Auschwitz, clarify commonly repeated misconceptions, and are not averse to admitting that even after almost eighty years since the liberation of the camp, there are still many gaps in our knowledge of the workings of the camp which might never be filled.Auschwitz: History, Place, and People includes a good number of black-and-white historical photographs of different areas of the camp and some camp maps rendered in color which help the reader understand the camp's spatial organization. Although Karwowska cautions the readers that such understanding is difficult, if even possible, to achieve. She writes, “Auschwitz continues to function very much as a fragmented place” and it “provides intriguing insights into the modalities that allow the symbolic (what Auschwitz represents to different people) and the material (the remnants of the camp) to coexist and influence one another” (p. 128).The pedagogical value of Auschwitz: History, Place, and People is greatly enhanced by the accompanying website, https://auschwitzacademicguide.arts.ubc.ca/, which provides additional teaching materials for each chapter. The lengthy interview with Halina Birenbaum, an Auschwitz survivor, is of high documentary value. Birenbaum, speaking in her native Polish, describes her experiences in the camp, starting with her arrival. The listeners can follow the very accurate English subtitles on the screen. The website is rich in visual materials, additional bibliography, and discussion prompts that could be of great value to teaching faculty. The website generously provides a link to a free download of the book as an epub.As someone who taught courses about the Holocaust at an American college and visited Auschwitz with a group of my students, I see Auschwitz: History, Place, and People; An Academic Guide to the Camp Complex as an important book written with North American college students in mind, but valuable for any reader interested in this topic.

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