Jewish Pavilion and Museum at Auschwitz Site Closed to the Public

The Jewish pavilion and museum, at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which the Polish government opened with much fanfare last winter, is not regularly open to the public and visitors must request special arrangements to see it, three Israeli historians reported. According to Prof. David Yaacobi, Dr. Michael Hed and Dr. Dov Kolka, all of the Israel Historical Society, who returned from Poland recently, they were surprised to find the Jewish pavilion closed to the general public.

Hed noted that earlier this year the Polish authorities had organized an official opening ceremony for the pavilion, at which Jewish delegations from Israel and elsewhere participated. Hed said Polish officials had explained to him that the pavilion was not open at all times because work inside it was still going on. They promised that eventually it would be open at all times.

But Hed said he and his companions, all of the Hebrew University staff, felt this was not the sole explanation of the present situation. The three historians said that on visiting the pavilion, after applying for permission, they found that notes explaining the various documents and photographs were printed in Polish and Yiddish only and in no Western language. They said the closed circuit television that was supposed to screen videotape films in the pavilion was not in working order when they were there.

The three historians filed a report with the Foreign Ministry, the Education Ministry, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and the Jewish Agency, asking their intervention with the Polish authorities to re-open the pavilion at Auschwitz. They wrote that they received the “impression that in Auschwitz, just like in Maidenek, Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was blurred intentionally and was mentioned marginally.”

They said an extreme example was a pamphlet depicting the Birkenau concentration camp where Jews were burned in crematoria. There was “not even one mention of the word Jews or anti-Semitism” in the pamphlet, they reported.