75 years after Auschwitz: commemoration of the Holocaust, but how?

“Oswiecim” is on the sign on the inside of the bus that leaves Kraków at 7:10 am at dawn in winter. But “Oswiecim”, this southern Polish city with around 38,000 inhabitants 50 kilometers to the west, is not the real goal of the sleepy tourists, wrapped in down coats, who went there early in the morning through Polish landscapes lying in the fog, the outdoors Pass in front of the bus window: gray residential complexes, unadorned houses, bare trees and lots of forest. One has to think of “contaminated landscapes”, for example, when one has read books by the Austrian writer and Poland expert Martin Pollack, who coined this term for regions in post-war Europe that have buried horrible secrets among themselves.

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