{"id":215546,"date":"2025-01-15T06:40:17","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/15\/a-house-at-auschwitz-opens-its-doors-to-a-chilling-past\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:40:17","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:40:17","slug":"a-house-at-auschwitz-opens-its-doors-to-a-chilling-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/15\/a-house-at-auschwitz-opens-its-doors-to-a-chilling-past\/","title":{"rendered":"A House at Auschwitz Opens Its Doors to a Chilling Past"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"550\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/01\/13\/multimedia\/xxpoland-auschwitz-01-qckl\/xxpoland-auschwitz-01-qckl-facebookJumbo.jpg?resize=1050,550&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"A House at Auschwitz Opens Its Doors to a Chilling Past\" title=\"A House at Auschwitz Opens Its Doors to a Chilling Past\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The mother lived for 42 years in a three-story house overlooking a former gas chamber and a gallows at Auschwitz, sometimes losing sleep at the thought of what had happened on the other side of her garden wall.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">But the house in Oswiecim, southern Poland, once the home of the death camp\u2019s wartime commandant, Rudolf H\u00f6ss, was \u201ca great place to raise children,\u201d said Grazyna<span class=\"css-8l6xbc evw5hdy0\">  <\/span>Jurczak, 62, a widow who raised two sons there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The home, the subject of the Oscar-winning movie \u201cThe Zone of Interest,\u201d had \u201csafety, silence, a beautiful garden,\u201d easy access to a river across the road and, in winter, space for an ice-skating rink for her two boys, she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Alone in the house after her husband died, she finally decided to leave. One reason, she said, was that she was disturbed by people who, after watching \u201cThe Zone of Interest,\u201d were tramping through her garden, peering through her windows and reminding her of her home\u2019s connection to the Holocaust.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Last summer, Ms. Jurczak agreed to sell the home to the <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.counterextremism.com\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Counter Extremism Project,<\/a> a New York-based group that wants to open the house to visitors. She moved out in August, and in October the New York group completed its acquisition of the home and an adjacent house built after the war.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-2\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI had to get out of there,\u201d Ms. Jurczak said at her new home in a modern apartment block in Oswiecim, a mile from her former house. She declined to say how much the house was sold for, but indicated that it was somewhat more than the property\u2019s estimated value of around $120,000.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mark Wallace, a lawyer and former U.S. diplomat who is the chief executive of the Counter Extremism Project, also declined to give the price, saying only that his organization \u201cwanted to do right\u201d by Ms. Jurczak\u2019s family but \u201cdid not want to pay a big premium for a former Nazi property, even if we could.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Now the house, at 88 Legionow Street, just outside the camp\u2019s perimeter fence, is being prepared to receive visits by the public for the first time, as part of commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Army\u2019s liberation of Auschwitz.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-3\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"http:\/\/auschwitz.org\/en\/\" title=\"Museum website\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum<\/a>, a Polish institution in Oswiecim committed to the remembrance of Nazi victims, will be hosting dozens of world leaders on Jan. 27.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">At the house, workers hired by the new owners have removed 14 dumpsters of debris and stripped away wallpaper and other postwar additions. That has left the property much as it was when the H\u00f6ss family lived there from 1941 to late 1944, including the Nazi-era lock on the bathroom door reading \u201cfrei\/besetzt.,\u201d German for free\/occupied.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A mezuzah, a parchment containing biblical verses, has been attached to the front door frame to honor Jewish tradition \u2014 and repudiate the fanaticism of its former occupant, the Auschwitz commander. After the war, Commandant H\u00f6ss recalled how the successful experimental gassing of Russian prisoners in 1941 \u201cset my mind at rest, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">He was hanged in 1947 at a gallows placed between his former home and a Nazi crematory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-4\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">On a table in a downstairs corner room that Commandant H\u00f6ss used as a home office lies a heap of torn and crumpled Nazi-era newspapers and other wartime artifacts found after the house was sold. There is also a coffee mug, embossed with the seal of the SS, and German beer bottles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-5\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Retrieved from the attic, where they had been stuffed to block a hole, were the striped trousers once worn by an Auschwitz prisoner. Researchers are trying to work out who wore them by deciphering a faded prisoner number, written next to a small red triangle signifying that the wearer was a political prisoner and a nearly vanished yellow star designating a Jew.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThis house has been closed for 80 years. It was out of reach to the victims and their families. Finally, we can open it to honor survivors and show that this place of incredible evil is now open to all,\u201d Mr. Wallace said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The plan, Mr. Wallace said, is to turn the house, along with the adjacent property, into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, a new organization that will work to expand the pledge of \u201cNever Again\u201d from historical memory to current action.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Piotr Cywinski, a Polish historian and director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum since 2006, said his state-run institution wanted to preserve its core mission of remembrance but saw value in supporting a project focused on the present and future, as well as the past.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-6\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cFighting against today\u2019s reality is easier for an NGO than for a state institution,\u201d he said, lamenting the rise across Europe of populism, which he calls \u201cthe cancer of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-7\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The new center will encompass the entire territory of Commandant H\u00f6ss\u2019s wartime property, including a long sealed-off garden area where he met with Hitler\u2019s security chief, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Mengele, the \u201cangel of death\u201d doctor, and other Nazi dignitaries tasked with exterminating Jews. Daniel Libeskind, an <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/05\/02\/realestate\/02sqft.html\" title=\"\">American architect,<\/a> has been commissioned to redesign the property.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Libeskind said he had drawn up preliminary plans that envisage turning the interior of the house into \u201ca void, an abyss\u201d \u2014 the external walls are protected by a <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/whc.unesco.org\/en\/list\/31\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">UNESCO preservation order<\/a> \u2014 and the construction of a new partly buried structure in a garden area with meeting rooms, a library and a data center.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">More than two million people visit the former Auschwitz camp each year and, the architect said, come away \u201chorrified and mesmerized by death\u201d but also need \u201cto engage with contemporary antisemitism and other extremism in our political culture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Jacek Purski, the director of a Polish anti-extremism group, who is involved in the project, said he wants to use the house and the past Nazi horrors as a weapon against what he sees as a resurgence of extremist ideologies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-8\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cA house is a house,\u201d Mr. Purski said, looking out of a second-story window of the former H\u00f6ss house toward the chimney of a former Nazi crematory. \u201cBut it is in uninteresting, regular houses like this where extremism is happening today.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-9\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Jurczak, the former owner, said she still struggles to reconcile happy, ordinary memories of the house with its gruesome past.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Reminiscing about her family\u2019s time there she suddenly stopped herself: \u201cI worry that I sound like Ms. H\u00f6ss,\u201d she said, referring to the commandant\u2019s wife, Hedwig H\u00f6ss. In the movie, Ms. H\u00f6ss gushes about her Polish home as \u201cparadise\u201d and is shown trying on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner sent to slaughter by her husband.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The commandant\u2019s wife, Ms. Jurczak decided after watching the movie, \u201cwas perhaps even worse than her husband,\u201d in her indifference to human suffering.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-10\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">While awaiting execution in a Polish jail after the war, Mr. H\u00f6ss, the former commandant, wrote an autobiography that Primo Levi, the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, described as the work of a \u201cdrab functionary\u201d who \u201cevolved step by step into one of the greatest criminals in history.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-11\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The house where Mr. H\u00f6ss lived was built between the two great wars of the last century by a Polish military officer serving in an adjacent army camp, which was seized by the Nazis after their 1939 invasion of Poland and turned into an extermination factory. At least 1.1 million men, women and children were murdered there, mostly in gas chambers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Grabbed by the SS as a home for the Auschwitz commandant, who changed the street number to 88, a numerical code for Heil Hitler, the house was returned to its original owner after the war and later sold to the family of Mr. Jurczak\u2019s husband, who owned it until last year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Cywinski, the Auschwitz-Birkanau museum director, said he was eager to work with the Counter Extremism Project, in its efforts to combat extremism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-12\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Extremism, he said, \u201cis unfortunately not a mental illness; it is a method\u201d that exploits widespread feelings of frustration.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ordinary people with ordinary ambitions, he added, can turn into monsters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. H\u00f6ss, he said, \u201cwas a wonderful father to his kids and, at the same time, the main organizer of the most brutal killings in the history of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-798hid etfikam0\">Anatol Magdziarz<!-- --> contributed reporting from Warsaw.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/15\/world\/europe\/auschwitz-zone-of-interest-house.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The mother lived for 42 years in a three-story house overlooking a former gas chamber and a gallows at Auschwitz, sometimes losing sleep at the thought of what had happened on the other side of her garden wall. But the house in Oswiecim, southern Poland, once the home of the death camp\u2019s wartime commandant, Rudolf [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/01\/13\/multimedia\/xxpoland-auschwitz-01-qckl\/xxpoland-auschwitz-01-qckl-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[118995,20025,38866,170055,79,170054,8197,887,170057,170056,170053],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215546"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215548,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215546\/revisions\/215548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}