What is the significance of such a gift in auschwitz?

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Between June 18 and 22, 1944, the Auschwitz Report, written by two Slovak Jewish prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, and composed a report in Slovak by the end of April, goes public worldwide through media channels in Switzerland.

In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and wrote a report providing some of the first reliable eyewitness accounts of the camp. Romanian diplomat Florian Manoliu, who was assisting George Mandel-Mantello in rescue efforts, received a copy of the Protocol and immediately gave it to Mandel-Mantello in June. Recognizing the Protocol’s importance, Mandel-Mantello recopied it, translated it, distributed it to Swiss Protestant clergy, and launched a worldwide press campaign condemning Nazi atrocities.

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When the Anti-Defamation League announced on Tuesday that anti-Semitic assaults had doubled in the U.S. from 2017 to 2018, the news was shocking but, sadly, not entirely surprising: a shooting left one dead at a California synagogue last Sunday, just days before Thursday’s observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

One effect of that sobering shift is being felt in New York City at a museum located a 10-minute walk from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Its full name declares it “The Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust” and it was built with six sides to represent the six million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust. Even so, when it opened in 1997, its founders decided to put an emphasis on Jewish heritage in order to differentiate it from the recently opened the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But in the last year, the museum’s board has considered modifying its name, in order to give the Holocaust more prominent placement.

While the museum hasn’t officially changed its name yet, its new emphasis is already clear: starting May 8, it will host the largest-ever traveling exhibit on Auschwitz, Nazi Germany’s biggest killing center. The exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away opens on the anniversary of the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany in World War II. It features more than 600 original objects, including major loans from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum that had never been seen outside of Poland before the exhibition firm Musealia first produced the show in Madrid from December 2017 to February 2019.

Though it was just one of the half-dozen Nazi camps that scholars identify as “killing centers,” there’s a reason Auschwitz is the focus of this new phase of the museum’s life.

“Auschwitz has become the focus of the history of the Holocaust,” says the exhibit’s chief curator, Robert Jan van Pelt, an architectural historian who is considered by many as the preeminent scholar of Auschwitz.

One key to its role in Holocaust education is that from 1942 to 1944, Auschwitz became the largest of those killing centers. Of the approximately 1.3 million people who were deported to Auschwitz, 1.1 million of those were Jewish people, and of those 1.1 million Jewish people, 1 million were murdered or died there.

But, crucially, enough of those who were sent there survived to speak of what they had seen — and in the years since, that has made all the difference. “It’s the only extermination camp with modern crematoria equipped with gas chambers, which created an efficient factory of death,” says van Pelt, “but it also encompassed a slave labor camp, from which there were actually enough survivors to give a substantial body of testimony after the war.”

About 200,000 Auschwitz prisoners left the camp, including survivors sent to other camps as well as those liberated from Auschwitz when the Soviet Army rescued an estimated 7,000 prisoners on Jan. 27, 1945.

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The experience in Auschwitz inspired survivors’ writings, from Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, published right after the war in 1946 (in English in 1967), to Italian chemist Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, first published in Italian in 1947 (in English in 1959), based on his time at the IG Farben laboratory on the Auschwitz complex. Elie Wiesel’s 1956 Night, (published in English in 1960), was inspired by his time as a prisoner Auschwitz. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night,” Wiesel wrote. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.” He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, for being “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterize the world.”

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials from 1963 to 1965 brought further attention to the camp, as they brought the perpetrators of these crimes to justice.

Later, due in large part to the awareness created earlier, Hollywood would pick up the same thread, centering Auschwitz in films from Holocaust, the 1978 four part TV mini-series, to Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning movie Schindler’s List in 1993, which is credited with inspiring Holocaust survivors to open up about their experience.

And after the fall of communism, as countries that had been a part of the Eastern bloc opened up, discussions of the history of the Holocaust in those regions became more open too, says Piotr M. A. Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. This allowed more tourists to visit Auschwitz, which was by then the Holocaust site with which many were most familiar; in 2018, a record 2.15 million people visited the museum there.

“I think more and more, people are coming to reflect on the present,” he says, “People are looking more on the past, in order to imagine the future. We don’t know where we are going.” The story of the Holocaust, the story of Auschwitz, as he puts it, is “never-ending.”

The more these stories were out there, the more other Auschwitz survivors started to open up about their experiences with their loved ones, telling their stories in order to preserve family history and pass along life lessons. Cywiński argues that Auschwitz survivors “came back to this history when their grandchildren are born, and can speak more easily or more naturally to their grandchildren than their own children.”

But today, as the number of these survivors dwindles, education about Auschwitz will have to enter a new phase. Museums are thus playing an important role in making sure these stories still get told through artifacts like personal belongings, video testimonies and even as holograms.

“In a world of ‘fake news,’ people believe museums. They don’t always believe a lot of other things they read online, but museums have an authenticity to them,” argues Bruce C. Ratner, Chairman of The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial, who had relatives who died in Auschwitz. “We all hoped that after 1945, we would not hear about mass murders and immigration and refugee issues again, and yet they’re top headlines today.”

Write to Olivia B. Waxman at .

The crowds around any Western city's high street in the run-up to Christmas indicate that gift-giving is a major element of consumer behavior. Even outside the pre-Christmas rush, there are multiple angles from which to study the way consumers navigate the marketplace and choose presents, usually with intentions of maintaining relationships with the intended recipients. And yet, it is only in the past decade or so that identity-based motivations have been researched. Now, for the first time, a paper examines how identity issues might shape a person's gifting behavior in a very particular context: Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The three authors of the paper, Jill Klein from the University of Melbourne, Tina Lowrey from HEC and Cele Otnes from the University of Illinois, acknowledge that there are “moral and ethical issues implicit” in exploring the Holocaust to understand gifting behavior. They write that their work is not “an opportunistic attempt to investigate a consumer behavior phenomenon”. Rather, Jill Klein, who as the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor is very attuned to this horrific historical period, was doing larger-scale work on the Holocaust when she noticed a large number of giving incidents in the memoirs of survivors. She and her two co-authors then engaged in a study of a selection of memoirs in order to expand general knowledge on gifting and understand its role as “an act of defiance against the mortification of the self in identity-stripping contexts”. 

An extreme context

The Nazi camps were perhaps the most extreme example of a setting designed to destroy identity. Upon arrival, prisoners were forced to have their heads shaved, to wear a uniform instead of their own clothes, and were addressed by numbers instead of names. And yet, even in that environment, “the desire to maintain one's identity is overpowering”, says Tina Lowrey. She and her co-authors read many accounts where people took life-threatening risks and made sacrifices that defied logical expectations. Some quotes from memoirs are actually so powerful that Tina Lowrey admits she sometimes finds herself tearing up, or sees her audience shed tears, when she reads them. At the same time, these perhaps surprising accounts of gifts can be explained from an identity perspective, through three main motivations. 

Gift-giving to regain control

The first motivation for gift-giving identified by the researchers is agency (action). In 13% of the instances of giving, the prisoners did so to feel that they at least occasionally were able to assume a modicum of control. In many cases, gifts, such as those given to “capos” (prisoners in charge of supervising other prisoners), could be categorized as bribes, as ways of obtaining future favors – likely life-saving favors. One memoirist who strategically gave a capo a tin of sardines was rewarded with lighter work detail. He wrote that he felt “like a whore” but also felt clever for having turned the system to his advantage. Besides restoring identity as an autonomous agent, such “agentic giving” enabled prisoners to avoid the very undesirable identity of Muselman (a common term across camps), or a person who has lost the will to live. But are such examples really gifts? Tina Lowrey says there is indeed a “negative implication” to the agency motivation, which is of behaving in a “calculating” way. “But you can also ask whether altruism exists at all, for even when you expect nothing in return from your gift, you still have the psychological benefit of feeling good about yourself,” she adds. 

Concentration camp prisoners reestablished their humanity by investing in caring relationships and by making sacrifices for the benefit of strangers. 

Gift-giving to re-establish social identity and humanity

A more typical motivation behind gift-giving in camps, which seemed characteristic in 65% of the recorded instances, was to re-establish a social identity. The idea, for example for those who had lost relatives, says Tina Lowrey, was to re-create belonging, to form a new “pseudo-family along national or religious lines”. In his memoir, one survivor writes about his clique and its “surrogate fathers”: “My emotional void was filled...Our little community practiced mutual assistance … My contribution consisted of a liter of soup.” The three authors also identified a third identity-based motivation, which was identified in 19% of instances: giving to re-establish humanity, not only by taking control or investing in a caring relationship, but also through acts of sacrifice to strangers. Tina Lowrey recalls one particular story of a prisoner who had already passed a selection to avoid being sent to the gas chamber, who took the place of a very weak prisoner waiting in line and passed the selection again. “Typically, this is a very spontaneous gesture, not thought through at all, and often the giver hits himself across the head afterwards, wondering why he did that,” says the researcher. “This is perhaps the closest you come to altruistic behavior”, she adds. 

Anticipated reckoning

Overall, the memoirs contained many instances of inmates recovering a sense of dignity, humanity and morality by giving to others. Another dimension that the researchers uncovered in this study, which would not likely have been uncovered in the more “normal” context of gift-giving within families or couples in the Western world, is that of “anticipated reckoning”. Many behaved altruistically because, in the event that they survived, they did not want to regret the past later. “The way the current self expects the future self to look back is very clear in some quotes,” points out Tina Lowrey. One good example is the following excerpt from a memoir: “If one survived at the price of overreaching [the point of no return] one would be holding onto a life that had lost all meaning.” The authors believe anticipated reckoning is relevant to explain how decisions are made in challenging situations: “From a moral standpoint, a crisis context may be one in which all hell has broken loose, and one must pull from one's past or imagine from one's future to reconstruct a moral compass.”