• Auschwitz liberation
• 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation
• Netanyahu in Auschwitz
• Auschwitz survivors
• Polish-Jewish relations

      The theater of politics stages more and more often tragicomedies. Absurd ideas and ridiculous acts expressed with dramatic seriousness start to have tragic consequences for the polarized and less and less amused audience. If it were not for polarization and siding with one troupe, common sense would call the audience to leave en mass, abandoning the politicians to themselves. When the lights go off and X is silent, there should be space for reflection. But our tribalism, basic curiosity and ferocious sensation-seeking makes us sit there and continue this theater of illusion. This continues until we are overwhelmed with a barrage of talking points, obscuring basic ideas. Contemporary political spin with its broad commentariat and echo chamber of social media is about polarizing the audience and then beating it in the corner with just one narrative. Dialogue, rationality, and consensus as corner stones of democracy have been traded for the razzle-dazzling of social media clickbait shit storms. Every domain of life is saturated with politics as the culture of having an instant position and commenting on everything is omnipresent and growing. If everything belongs to the politicians, there is no more common space left for the democratic society. This is how tyrannies are born. 

Image: Block number 3 in Auschwitz I. Photo: T.Cebulski – Sky Heritage Pictures.

The early 20th century tyrannies concluded with Soviet gulags and Nazi camps for those who questioned authority. Genocide became a legalized and socially accepted political tool. People were surfeit with and directed by ideologically dictated hatred of the politically singled out other. The world succumbed to Auschwitz.

Those disastrous experiences of humanity were the very corner stone for the postwar international cooperation and the gradual construction of legal order guarded by universal global institutions. International law established norms in human rights, diplomacy, war and economy. Meaning, all domains of life oriented into the universal sense of security and wellbeing of individuals. Its progressive and idealistic premises were often only later accepted as individual state laws. They are far from being abstract the way we see them today, after we took those for granted decades ago.

The decades we live in highlight the dominance of the narcissistic, populist individuals in politics: older men who are convinced they are never wrong, who incite divisions and have nothing to lose. Short-term oriented populism and nationalistic sentiment mixed with revisionist approach to international law and order took its toll during WWII. For decades after 1945, the inner responsibility of most democratic politicians sidetracked populism as a method of building support. The memory of loss of life, the memory of Auschwitz as well, personal traumas, defined the minimal responsibility in the choice of political tools. Even when political conflicts were raging across societies there was care for a certain minimal common ground rooted in identity and protected by state and international laws.

Image: Auschwitz II – Birkenau. Photo: T.Cebulski – Sky Heritage Pictures.

Where are we 80 years later on the eve of commemorating one anniversary of 1945 after another? Very soon the eyes of the world will focus, for as short as our contemporary attention span allows, on Auschwitz. The 27^th of January is now an International Holocaust Remembrance Day recognized by international law. In studying the round of liberation anniversaries, these are always politicians who take over and redirect attention from the sacred cemetery of Auschwitz, which calls for silent reflection, into themselves.  Some 20 years ago the Auschwitz State Museum stopped formally inviting the state delegations and gave all of its organizational attention to the survivors. States were just informed about the ceremony, and it was up to their discretion to send a delegation or not. Politicians were gradually sidetracked from touting their agendas at the ceremony and made to sit in uncomfortable chairs and listen. For the last 20 years, instead of listening to political slogans like ‘never again’ and rather hopeless calls for peace we have heard from survivors themselves.

10 years ago it was Roman Kent  begging us not to be indifferent in the words:

“And yet, in view of the current participation and awareness of so many world leaders, there is visible proof of compassion and involvement instead of indifference.  This is progress …. it is now up to the leaders of tomorrow.  But there remains so much more to be done.  We all must be involved and stay involved .... no one should ever be just a spectator!  I feel so strongly about this point that if I had the power, I would add an Eleventh Commandment to the universally accepted Ten Commandments: “You should never, never be a bystander.”

5 years ago it was Marian Turski to remind us:

“This is very important. Thou shalt not be indifferent in the face of lies about history. Thou shalt not be indifferent when the past is distorted for today’s political needs. Thou shalt not be indifferent when any minority faces discrimination. Majority rule is the essence of democracy, but democracy also means that minority rights must be protected. Thou shalt not be indifferent when any authority violates the existing social contract. Be faithful to this commandment. To the Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt not be indifferent.

Because if you are indifferent, you will not even notice it when upon your own heads, and upon the heads of your descendants, another Auschwitz falls from the sky.”

This year there may be fewer survivors at the ceremony than the total number of years since the liberation of Auschwitz. The generational change brings also a memory change from the trauma-rooted prime memory to the constructed secondary memory prone to distortions. Soon, there will be no survivors to speak and politicians will rise again. In the postmodern world the value of truth which demands understanding of complexity is giving way to the simplistic operational narratives that serve the politics of memory or profit-oriented marketing. 

Image: Construction of a tent over the Death Gate in Birkenau for the 80th Anniversary of liberation. photo T. Cebulski-Sky Heritage Pictures

Unfortunately, in the weeks before the 80^th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, politicians are taking the center stage again. Just over a month before the ceremony The Washington Times published a fake news piece to blatantly inveigh about a diplomat from Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stating in a “Rzeczpospolita” newspaper interview, that if Benjamin Netanyahu chooses to be the part of the Israeli delegation to the event he will be imprisoned under the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). This columnist’s opinion contained also a vague political blackmail about negative consequences for Poland within the new Trump administration. The language and tone was a patronizing political newspeak not allowing any objection. Executive order was sent by the journalist to the peripheries.  This sparked the social media polarization and reduced the whole event to the very current position-taking in support or against Netanyahu and his presence in Poland. A typical snowball effect of self-serving political commentaries has ensued. The Polish Ministry refuted the fake news and waited. Meanwhile the media snowball caused the first delegations to boycott the event. The former CEO of the American Jewish Committee and a long-time advocate for strengthening Poland’s ties with Jews in diaspora and Israel, David Harris, has announced that he has cancelled his planned trip to Poland for the event. Polish waiting and lack of position was interpreted as antisemitism, what else?  The storm continued to rage to the point when on January 8^th the Polish president, looking for some political traction against the D. Tusk government, issued a letter asking the prime minister to guarantee that no arrest will take place.   A day later, the Polish government, being pushed against the wall, issued a fascinating resolution in which it “guarantees a free and secure access and participation in those ceremonies to the highest representatives of Israeli state”. Does it offer legally a safe conduct to Netanyahu in Poland? Not really. It is rather an attempt to close down the needless conversation. Attempt failed. The argument rages on, destroying the very essence of the commemoration of victims and preventing the reflection this moment demand and the reflection on where irresponsible politicians may lead us. To make the case more interesting, Israel already in mid-December 2024 declared that the minister of education, Yoav Kisch, will head its delegation. All those developments give B. Netanyahu an ample political options. He may choose to come personally, using the enforced hospitality to make a point against the ICC ruling. If he does there will be another skirmish about him delivering a speech. Poland has offered a wonderful opportunity to take apart another element of international law and legitimize selective ambiguity in international relations. In such way politicians are taking apart the entire international legal legacy created to prevent Auschwitz from happening again. Soon, we will be at the whim of the omnipresent and omnipotent political will of one leader, or a rapidly forming coalition of leaders who warp their populism with technocratic IT moguls.

Netanyahu's presence stirs emotions and political division, overshadowing the significance of Auschwitz's 80th liberation anniversary. The die of division has been cast. The actors are waiting just behind the curtains and their keyboards to start their agenda onslaught at the 27^th of January.  The truth today is always created by those who dominate the narrative.

As we approach this milestone anniversary, we are reminded not just of the horrors of the past but of our responsibility to honor the truth. The silence of the survivors will soon echo as a call to action—lest history be rewritten by those who prioritize power over memory. If everything belongs to the politicians, there is no more common space left for the democratic society. This is how tyrannies are born.

Tomasz Cebulski, PhD

Disclaimer : This text was written and edited by the human intelligence. The only one we have and can rely on. Thus, it may have some imperfections as a tribute to the sophistication of a human brain. Often imperfection helps us to remember.

RISIERA DI SAN SABBA

79 years ago the sites of mass murder within Action Reinhardt were gradually being closed and taken apart. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps finished what they were created for, the mass murder of Jewish communities. The German perpetrators in the late summer of 1943 were dismantling the primitive camp's structures to deny those ever existed and recoin this denial into silence and after-war impunity. In such circumstances, the revolts of Sondercommandos in Treblinka and Sobibor erupted.

At the same time, the perpetrators were looking for a convenient place to escape and continue their terror and death-marked operations. Many of the German and Austrian stuff started on this path in the 1930s when the German system of euthanasia was created. They supervised, perfected, and often invented new methods of murder and denial. People like Christian Wirth, Josef Oberhauser, Franz Stangl, Kurt Franz, Erwin Lambert, Gustav Wagner, and Odilo Globocnik started with the murder of individuals qualified as “life unworthy of living” in the light of German Nazi laws.  Then their experience was turned against political and social groups indicated as enemies by the German-Nazi state ideology.   Once they were deployed in occupied Poland from 1939 to 1943 they built and conducted an industrial-scale system of the genocide of local and European Jewish communities.

Action Reinhardt lasted from the early spring of 1942 till the fall of 1943 and took the lives of 1,7 million Jews of which 1,5 million were murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Sobibor, or Belzec.

For the executioners late 1943 meant relocation to Triest and its the San Sabba district. They started to convert a former rice-husking company into a Polizeihaftlager – Police Prisoners Camp – the camp was taking a well-known shape of a German Concentration Camp and was known under the name of Risiera di San Sabba.

The major tasks for the perpetrators were to establish a camp facility to terrorize the local population in the German occupation province of Adriatic Littoral, to subdue and force into cooperation Italian servicemen, to conduct anti-Yugoslav partisan operations in the region, and deport the local Jewish communities.

Erwin Lambert redesigned the boiler room of the facility into a makeshift crematorium and this space, centrally in the complex became a site of regular night executions.

There were at least 3000 people murdered at the site with their ashes dumped into the San Sabba harbor. There were thousands of Jews deported thorough the Risiera Camp into Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald or Ravensbruck.

Josef Oberhauser was the Risiera di San Sabba commandant. After the war, he was arrested in the Soviet Occupation zone and served 8 years in prison. In the 1963-64 Belzec trial in Munich, he was sentenced to 4,5 years in prison while 7 of the defendants and his genocide aides were acquitted. He served only 2 years and was released.

Oberhauser was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for his crimes committed in Italy, but the Italian extradition request failed multiple times. Oberhauser died on 22 November 1979 in Munich.

It started with a sprint and goes into a marathon relay race.

What have we learned after a month of the Russian war in Ukraine?  Is there something that we didn’t know before?

On February 24^th, 2022 everybody seemed to be in the starting blocks.  There was no space for the intricacies of a starter pistol.  At 05:00 AM Russia gave the signal to run with ballistic missiles fired at Ukrainian airports and heavy artillery shelling at the borders.

Everybody was ready for a sprint which gradually went into a hurdle race then a long marathon becoming now a relay marathon run.

The Polish sprint to the border to assist and support the first waves of refugees caused roads in south-eastern Poland to be displayed in purple on Google maps. Some cars returned empty as the border procedures were slow at first, causing kilometers-long lines of mothers with children waiting in hostile February weather conditions. I remember Tanya from Kyiv who stood for 25 hours tormenting herself with the blame of abandoning the country and exposing her children to the unknown length of the line in front. Or even more unknown on the other side of the border.  Soon the volunteer tents were set up along the line of people to provide food and shelter. Victoria—who fled the bombing  of the Kharkiv block of flats— when reminded by a young Polish volunteer that smoking kills, instantly fired back that, “bombs kill more.” There was laughter.  

COVID-19 restrictions gave way in the light of the humanitarian crisis unfolding. The very same people who only a few months earlier were convinced to consider which family member shall be invited to the Christmas table were now taking total strangers into their cars and homes. The 74 year- old Alksiey from Kyiv, a man who was one of the Chernobyl  liquidators asked me a question after 4 hours of driving. “And how about COVID in Poland?” We just gave each other a look and burst into laughter.

The last month was the management of chaos in an attempt to help and learn how to help better.

It has been a busy time when many Poles and people from all over Europe suspended their previous lives to give first-response following an instinct of providing humanitarian aid. To be frank, I think that we provide help also for very selfish and private reasons.  The first two days of sitting at home and vehemently scrolling the news were driving me to the point of madness. Going out there and providing help was for me a good way to protect my sanity in the shattered reality around.  

The Refugees at crossroads.

Often just after crossing the border being haunted and traumatized by imagery and sounds of war they need to make a life-changing decision about what next.  Shall we stay or shall we go? Where to stay and how to go? At this very moment in most cases, they have no idea that boarding a bus from a charity organization from Denmark or Germany instead of waiting at the overcrowded reception center has future implications for them and their children. Many of them are at their weakest, yet the reality is demanding to take sharp and informed decisions about their future. 

There is always hope that the war will be short and they shall stay close to return and rebuild. This is mixed with a sense of guilt for abandoning the country in need. The realization that in the future Ukraine needs its civilians alive sinks in very slowly.   There is always extreme tiredness, lack of sleep, no luggage, lack of documents, and in most cases crossing the Ukrainian border for the very first time in their lives when their loved ones are still on the other side.  

Can you take an informed decision about your future in such a moment of distress?

The moment when you are gasping for a minute of rest to collect thoughts.

What next…?

Last Tuesday, March 29^th  marked over a month into the war and it was an intensive day of travel logistics for me. After 20 years of working in inbound tourism, I have started to do lots of outbound travel and living arrangements for our Ukrainian sisters and brothers. Transportation, safe home, and rest first. Discussion about alternatives next. Nina runs from Kyiv with her mother and 6 year-old bedridden son. Lydia and Igor run from Kharkiv after 3 weeks of heavy Russian shelling.    The amazing chain of people builds a social media life rope to take Lydia and her son to Portugal and Nina with her family to Greece. Tuesday, March 29^th was the day of travel.

It is hard to describe how this life rope looks like but let me try

The people of first contact are the volunteers at the border and drivers who, after February 24, often suspended their lives to show up in the first row of help. They open their hearts and extend their hands to prevent the fall into the unknown or at least to make this transition smooth and painless. Some of them enter Ukraine; some stay on the Polish side

Then comes the little army of those who open their homes and apartments to host and give shelter. Often the less they have the more they share. Often they instantly react to despairing  FB ads about apartments needed now for a family of 6. Despite midnight arrival, they are ready with a smile, mattresses, and a couple of words in a bit of rusted school Russian. With an apology in their eyes that this is the best, they can give and add some softness to Russian words so that they don’t sound that Russian.

I have met only some of them but adored every minute of our task-oriented conversations.

The first days have shown the moral strength of some institutions and devotion to their founding values. It is not always easy to put those values into action. But it was a matter of one phone call at any time of day or night to hear the very needed,  “yes we have space”  at MDSM Oświęcim, Centrum Dialogu i Modlitwy in Oświęcim, or the refugee center in Cracow run by  Salam Lab, Zustricz Foundation,  JCC Cracow and UAinKrakow.pl.

Keyboard warriors

I have been struggling with social media for years promising myself to quit under the next and next algorithm change towards 100 % commercialization and sale of private life content. The last month showed the better face of social media as a logistic tool. A tool that is the first response instinct replaced the state red tape burdened structures. Thousands of fixers started groups like Help for Ukraine or Transport from the Border and combed the forums daily looking for matches. They keep the market of needs and help offers in balance. Mother with a child, driver, number of seats,  translator, Polish SIM card, apartment, humanitarian aid,  clothing, and work became the magic spell words for people making the matches. Yes, you can help very effectively from behind your computer screen and every next match meant a Ukrainian mother with a child having a place to stay overnight or over a month. It became an addictive game on the screen but with real-life results.   It sometimes meant as little as a driver who spend 12 hours from the Korczowa PL-UA border to Berlin returning the next day to hand a birthday gift to 9 years old Alisa from Kharkiv. Alisa was his passenger the day and night before.

At times it meant as much as Viber, FB, What’ Up and Messenger coordinated travel for Lydia and Igor from Russian shelled Saltievka district of Kharkiv into a warm Polish home in  Zelkow. The same social media channels with fixers were used two weeks later to take them from Zelkow to Lisboa. I would never expect that one can use social media to make people cross the formal borders with just Ukrainian certificates of birth. The Portuguese Embassy in Warsaw was responsive through Viber and produced travel papers instantly as the Portuguese charity chain run by Diogo Monteiro from Warsaw covered the costs and logistics of the flight.

Nina and Lydia with their families landed in Greece and Portugal last Tuesday and I have made a promise to bring them back into free Ukraine once they and their country are ready to meet again.

Social media works and as every piece of technology becomes its worst or its best in our hands. I have seen social media at its best over the last month or rather I have seen thousands of often anonymous fixers using social media responsively and responsibly to give hope or save lives.

Special thanks to “keyboard warriors” I have met, although I know that they are engaged in every other form of help as well.

Everybody was ready for a sprint which gradually went into a hurdle race then a long marathon becoming now a relay marathon run.

Running has never been my sport and I have major issues with crowds but the last month was a pleasure and honor to participate and observe this mass relay marathon run towards unity and help.

Text by Tomasz Cebulski