Smartphone App for Oshpitzin/Oswiecim

A version of post also appears on my En Route blog for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The latest Jewish travel app for smartphones and tablets takes you to a place that no longer exists except in memory: Oshpitzin.

Oshpitzin was the Jewish name for Oswiecim, the small town in southern Poland where the Nazis built Auschwitz which had a majority Jewish population before the Holocaust -- I’ve written a lot about the town and its difficulty in balancing its Holocaust identity with its pre-WW2 past, starting in the mid 1990s, when I dealt with the issue in the long chapter “Snowbound in Auschwitz” in my book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today, which was a sort of diary and meditation on nearly four days blocked in Oswiecim by a freak snowfall…...

Last year, the Auschwitz Jewish Center—a prayer, study and research center in Oswiecim—launched a project aimed at putting Oshpitzin back on the map. It started with a printed guidebook and followed on withan interactive web site, www.ospitzin.pl, that includes a map, pictures, history, testimonies and more.

Now, the Center as followed through with a smartphone App that can be used by armchair travelers as well as actual visitors to the town. It has an interactive map, videos, audio, photographs, etc.

Most of the sites the project—be it the guide book, the web site or the App—describes no longer exist. But it all entails a way to learn about the Jewish history (and general history) of a town that existed for hundreds of years before “Auschwtiz” changed its identity from a place of Jewish life into a place of Jewish murder.

As of now, the App is available in the iTunes store for IPhone and IPad—but it will soon be available on Android, too.

Poland: Oswiecim, the city of Auschwitz, wrestles with whether the past must be part of its future

My latest JTA story is about Oswiecim, the town outside of which Auschwitz was built.

Woman walks her baby in front of the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

JTA, July 21, 2011

OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) -- Can a town that exists in the shadow of death transform itself into a place of normalcy?

The question long has vexed Oswiecim, the town of 40,000 in southern Poland where the notorious Auschwitz death camp is located.

For decades, residents and city leaders have struggled to separate Oswiecim from Auschwitz and pull the town, its history and its cultural associations out from under the overwhelming black cloud of the death camp, which is now a memorial museum.

With only limited success to date, however, a new generation of town leaders is trying a different tack: bolstering Oswiecim as a vital local community, but also reaching out to connect with Auschwitz rather than disassociate from it.

"Ten or 15 years ago, many of us began thinking that the way to go was not to reject Auschwitz but to deal with it," said historian Artur Szyndler, 40, the director of research and education at the Auschwitz Jewish Center who grew up in Oswiecim under communism.

The town has adopted "City of Peace" as its official slogan. And for years a Catholic-run Dialogue and Prayer Center and a German-run International Youth Center near the camp have promoted reflection and reconciliation.

Downtown, the 10-year-old Auschwitz Jewish Center makes clear that before the Holocaust, Oswiecim had a majority Jewish population and was known widely by its Yiddish name, Oshpitzin. The center includes a Jewish museum and a functioning refurbished synagogue -- the only one in the city to survive. It runs study programs and serves as a meeting place for visiting groups.

And now the Oswiecim Life Festival, founded last year by Darek Maciborek, a nationally known radio DJ who was born and lives in Oswiecim, aims to use music and youth culture to fight anti-Semitism and racism.

"This place seems to be perfectly fitting for initiatives with a message of peace," Maciborek said. "A strong voice from this place is crucial."

The closing concert of this year's festival, held in June, included the Chasidic reggae star Matisyahu. He gave a midnight performance for a crowd of 10,000 in a rainswept stadium just a couple of miles from the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work sets you free") gate of the death camp.

"It was an incredibly symbolic moment," Oswiecim City Council President Piotr Hertig told JTA. "It was a very important symbol that a religious Jew was performing at a festival in such a place."

Hertig said the new push to bolster Oswiecim and reach out more to the Auschwitz museum and its visitors is partly due to a generational shift in the town.

For a long time, most of Oswiecim's population consisted of thousands of newcomers from elsewhere in Poland who settled here after World War II. But today's community leaders increasingly include 30- and 40-somethings like Hertig and Maciberok who were born in Oswiecim and feel rooted here.

The town now has plans to go ahead with several projects that had been thwarted by outgoing Mayor Janusz Marszalek, who had particularly strained relations with the Auschwitz Memorial, according to Hertig. These include a new visitors' center for the memorial and a park on the riverbank just opposite Auschwitz that will be connected to the camp memorial by a foot bridge.

"This will be a very good place for people to come after visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau, where they can meditate, reflect and soothe their negative emotions," Hertig said.

Hertig said he hoped new programs and study visits developed with the Auschwitz memorial will encourage longer stays by visitors. Plans are in the works to build an upscale hotel in town and refurbish the main market square and other infrastructure.

"Auschwitz, on our outskirts, is the symbol of the greatest evil," Hertig said. "But at the same time we want to show to others that Oswiecim is a town with an 800-year history that wants to be a normal living town."

Located on the opposite side of the Sola River from the Auschwitz camp, Oswiecim has an old town center with a pleasant market square, several imposing churches, and a medieval castle and tower. In the modern part of town is a new shopping mall and state-of-the-art public library, as well as a big civic culture center that hosts a variety of events, including an annual Miss Oswiecim beauty pageant.

But few of the more than 1.2 million people who visit the Auschwitz camp each year ever set foot in Oswiecim or even know that the town exists.

"It is difficult to comprehend what it must be like to call this city your hometown," said Jody Manning, a doctoral student at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who is writing a dissertation on life in Oswiecim and Dachau, Germany, also the site of a concentration camp.

Local residents long have resented that most outsiders make no distinction between their town and the death camp.

"People from outside are sometimes shocked. They ask how I can live in Auschwitz. But I don't -- I live in Oswiecim," said Gosia, a 30-year-old woman who works at the Catholic Dialogue Center. "This is Oswiecim, my hometown -- not Auschwitz!"

It remains to be seen whether the new push can help remove the stigma from Oswiecim and achieve a less strained modus vivendi with the death camp memorial. "People have the right to live normally, but I don't think they'll be able to disassociate from Auschwitz," said Stanislaw Krajewski, a leading Polish Jewish intellectual. "The best they can do is to use it in a constructive way; the very name Auschwitz has a magical power."

Poland again

Krakow. One of my favorite images. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I realize I haven't posted for more than a week - a week so full of experiences that should go on this blog that I feel I'll never catch up!

I'm in Poland, where I have been at the annual Festival of Jewisg Culture, the great mix of performance and party where I try to come every year, and which I have written about so much.

As I type this, I am sitting in the cafe of the Galicia Jewish Museum, waiting for the start of the gala outdoor concert that mark the final Saturday night of the festival. They used to call it the Final Concert, but you can't say that really now, as further events go on on Sunday, Including some concerts. The official name is Shalom on Szeroka (Szeroka is the name of the main Jewish square in Krakow's Jewish district, Kazimierz). But it looks like this year they have gone back to calling it Jewish Woodstock -- which was a term used to describe the festival already in 1992....

I love the signage you see on the square - have not yest downloaded pictures but will post some examples. One sign advertises that the cafe in question takes "reservations for Shalom."

Reservations accepted for shalom...Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The weather is not great, chilly and rain is forecast. I plan to stay for a couple of hours, to meet up with some people, and then I am heading back to Oswiecim, an hour away, the town outside of which Auschwitz is located, where I have been staying - I'm writing about attempts by the town to redefine itself, something I first wrote about 18 years ago in the chapter "Snowbound in Auschwitz" in my 1994 book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House. A lot has changed, but also not....

Poland -- New project on pre-WW2 Oshpitzin (Auschwitz)

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Auschwitz Jewish Center is launching on April 28 a new guide to pre-World War II Oshpitzin -- AKA Oswiecim, AKA Auschwitz.  The town had a majority Jewish population before World War II, and the project include an online map and hard-copy guide to the town's Jewish history and heritage.

The Auschwitz Jewish Center, opened in 2000, occupies a complex including the only surviving synagogue in Oswiecim and hosts a Jewish museum and education programs.

Poland -- Danny Ghitis' photos of Oswiecim

A cozy cafe in Oswiecim. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Danny Ghitis is a talented young photographer who has taken a great series of pictures about Oswiecim -- the living town in southern Poland outside of which is the infamous Auschwitz death camp. I'm delighted to see that a selection of them is featured on NPR. Before World War II, most of the residents of Oswiecim were Jewish.

Many tourists come in buses to Auschwitz for the day and may not notice the people who live in the surrounding towns. "Those who do notice," Danny Ghitis writes on his website, "a nearby shopping mall, high school sweethearts holding hands, nicely dressed families are headed to church — are faced with an impossible question: How can life exist in the aftermath of such overwhelming evil?"

Ghitis, Brooklyn-based photographer and grandson of a holocaust survivor, was plagued by that question, and spent some time in 2010 exploring the psyche of Oswiecim — as well as his own. "I was aware of my own strong biases," he writes in an e-mail, "but as a journalist I knew the reality of this town had to be more complex than is often painted."

Years ago, I wrote a long, long essay about being snowbound for three days iat Auschwitz and exploring the town of Oswiecim and how the looming shadow of the death camp affected the town -- it formed the final chapter of my book Upon the Doorposts of Thy House: Jewish Life in East-Central Europe, Yesterday and Today. The book is out of print -- but it's still a good read!

Poland -- Dark Tourism at Auschwitz

Gate at Auschwitz, July 09. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

There's an academic field (or sub-discipline?) known as "Dark Tourism." The term -- as the web site of the Dark Tourism Forum puts it, is

a label first coined in the mid 1990’s by Professors John Lennon and Malcolm Foley of Glasgow Caledonian University, [and] is the act of travel and visitation to sites of death, disaster and the seemingly macabre. Lennon and Foley’s book ‘Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster’, first published in 2000, whilst not the first publication to address the subject area within academia, it was the first to systematically outline some of the issues and concerns associated with tourism, death and associated suffering.

The Forum cites as examples of Dark Tourism such varied places as the London Dungeon, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Ground Zero in New York, the Sixth Floor in Dallas (from which President Kennedy was shot), Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC -- and, of course, Auschwitz.

I guess a lot of the travel that I carry out, write about (and, OK, promote) to sites of Jewish heritage can seem to some observers to fall under this rubric -- afterall, I'm talking about often abandoned cemeteries, ruined synagogues and other relics of a civilization and people who were all but wiped off the map in a horribly brutal fashion....

I prefer to see visiting these places, however, as an affirmation -- and acknowledgement -- of life; of lives lived, of culture created, of richness and fullness over the centuries. Yes, destroyed: but, as my brother Sam once (more than once) put it, Jews did not sit around in Europe for hundreds of years just waiting to be killed....their lives, culture, religious traditions, creativity, contributed mightily to Europe as a whole, and visiting sites of Jewish heritage is a recognition of this fact -- as fact that was woefully ignored, suppressed, or diminished for decades.

Visiting specific Holocaust sites is, on the other hand, a pure example of Dark Tourism. Commemoration, memorial and recognition, too, of course. But at death camps and execution sites one remembers and responds to the death and disaster.

Last weekend, I took a friend to visit Auschwitz for the first time. He is an American musician who was on tour in central Europe, and the festival he played in southern Poland was the first time he had been to Poland. Auschwitz is located only an hour or so away from the festival site. My friend had one morning free after the gig, so I drove him up there.

He is not Jewish, but he was born just four years after the end of World War II, and he remembers from his childhood how heavily the legacy of the War and the Holocaust was felt -- even in America. He grew up with the images and the imagery: the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, the crematoria; the railway head at Birkenau where railcars of Jews were separated, to the left, to the right.

Even though we had very little time that morning, touring the site with him -- first Auschwitz I, where the museum exhibits are arranged in brick barracks, then the vast, empty field at Birkenau -- was a powerful and moving experience.

I have been to Auschwitz many times by now, and each time I go there I feel that I am stepping into a place that is sort of in a different dimension. Things get distorted: thoughts, feelings, time, sounds. Inside the perimeter, I often feel that nothing outside exists. Yet, on occasion, I have spent hours simply prowling around outside the camp, photographing the signage and everyday banalities that do exist there "in the real world." (Afterall, more than half a million people a year visit Auschwitz, so it's clear that there will be infrastructure such as parking lots, coffee shops, WCs, restaurants, hotels, and shops selling books and souvenirs.)

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

This time, I mainly just walked with my friend. Seeing it all, a bit, through his eyes -- his first tangible encounter with the reality of Auschwitz -- as well as my own.

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The night before we went there, we sat talking with some of the members of the Czech band that my friend was touring with. The young drummer, David, suddenly volunteered that one of his grandmothers was a survivor of Auschwitz, and that her parents, his great-grandparents, had been murdered there.

Did he want to go with us? I asked him.

No, he had already been and didn't need to go back, he said. But, he told us, "say hello to my family...."

Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

P.S. For those visiting Auschwitz who want to see how Jews lived before the Holocaust, I recommend a visit to the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oswiecim, the town outside which the death camp was built. Oswiecim's pre-war population was more than 50 percent Jewish -- it was known in Yiddish as Oshpitsin -- and the museum is located in the complex that includes the town's one surviving synagogue. The exhibit deals largely with local pre-war Jewish life, and the center has other resources, too.