“Memory has evolved over time,” analyzes historian Denis Peschanski

Why are commemorations around the memory of the deportation organized around the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945?

Because Auschwitz carries a very strong symbolism, even if it does not summarize all the camps. This concentration camp complex is sprawling and intertwined in the town of Oswiecim (Poland).

At Auschwitz I, from 1940, the “enemies of the Reich”, that is to say the politicians, were grouped together. Then, we expanded with Auschwitz II, that is to say Birkenau, both a concentration camp and the killing camp of mainly Jews and gypsies. Finally, Auschwitz III, i.e. Monowitz was a forced labor camp for the IG Farben chemical factory.

The connection between the three entities clearly reflects the concentration process in all its complexity.

Is there still much to discover about the history of the camps?

By definition, history is a science in motion. New sources can always emerge and perspectives on the same event are constantly renewed. We know the essentials about the Shoah. But studies are still underway.

Thus, Father Patrick Desbois, for example, a specialist in the Holocaust by bullets – these mass killings of Jews organized by the Nazis as they advanced in the Soviet Union, from the summer of 1941 – is now interested in role of the “neighbors” of the concentration and killing camps: what did the Polish inhabitants of these regions know? How did they manage this proximity when they were called upon for stewardship, communications, etc. There were indifferents, denouncers and righteous among them, but we must collect and study the data to have a vision of ‘together.

And about the Auschwitz complex in particular?

In fact, we also know that 2,500 French people were sent by the Compulsory Labor Service (STO) to the farms and factories around Auschwitz. Unfortunately we did not question them about what they had seen, understood, felt. And now these witnesses have disappeared. But we can seek to study the traces and texts they left and try to shed light on this angle of “neighborhood”.

We should also study mortality more closely, by “categories” of deportees: what percentage of survivors among politicians compared to those categorized “racially”? And afterwards: with all the privations suffered, I have the feeling that the survivors of the camps had a shorter life expectancy than their non-deported contemporaries. But this remains to be documented.

How has the memory of the deportation evolved?

Memory is part of history: it evolves over time. Thus, from 1947, in Poland and in the Soviet bloc in general, the memory narrative of the camps refused to distinguish between the types of victims of the “Great Patriotic War” as it was then called.

The collapse of this empire, in 1989, will therefore help to show the singularity of the Shoah, a process, I remind you, where human beings are eliminated because of their Jewish identity, assimilated to a supposed “inferior race” , and not for what they would have done – which is the case of the resistance.

It is often said that this singularity was suppressed.

In Western Europe, the memory of the Shoah has never been silenced. As early as 1946, at the Nuremberg trials, for example, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a resistance fighter, clearly explained to the judges how the Jews were systematically murdered. Stories are published, such as that of Primo Lévi in ​​1947 in Italy. Until 1949, all memories coexisted. Afterwards, with the rise of the Cold War, West Germany became an ally, the USSR an enemy… memories of the war and the occupation faded.

After 1958, with de Gaulle’s return to power and a very strong communist party, on the contrary, we glorified the heroic figure of the resistance fighter. It was the time (1969) of this wonderful film Army of Shadows, by Jean-Pierre Melville. Then, from the mid-1980s, without the resistance disappearing, collective memory will highlight the Jewish victim. I am talking about a coexistence of “weak memories” and “strong memories” which evolve over time.

On the Auschwitz site, can we follow this evolution?

On site, the real turning point was 2005, with the initiative of Jacques Chirac, then president, who invited, for the first time, dozens of heads of state to the commemoration ceremonies and rebuilt the French pavilion, in explaining the different categories of victims.

Today, is there competition between memories?

No, there is rather complementarity. Since the five-year term of François Hollande (2012-2017), discourses have converged around “memorial plurality”. Even with regard to the Resistance, we distinguish that from the inside, that from the outside which acts from London. We also mention the Jewish resistance fighters.

At the same time, since the 1970s and the death of de Gaulle, we have gradually rediscovered the “black side” of the Occupation: the Vichy regime, the collaborators… are no longer taboo. Thus, on April 16 in the Vercors, when Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to the resistance fighters, he did not hesitate to also mention the harmful role of the militiamen.