Paweł Szypulski | Greetings from Auschwitz

Paweł Szypulski

Greetings from Auschwitz

Zürich, Switzerland: Edition Patrick Fey, 2015

88 pp., 22.5 × 21.5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Postcards that cost a few cents to produce and can be sold to tourists for a dollar are obviously a good business practice for cash-strapped historical sites, but the idea of sending a greeting in the mail on the back of a card depicting genocide is disquieting, to say the least. 

Greetings from Auschwitz collects examples of cards from the most notorious of Nazi death camps, most of which have been circulated through the mail. The Polish artist and curator Paweł Szypulski presumably spent the many years it took to amass the collection scouring flea markets, garage sales and historical archives to unearth cards featuring images of the camps' barracks, barbwire fences, crematoria, even piles of naked corpses. 

The year that the book was published saw 1.75 million tourists visiting the site that formerly housed a brutal complex of over forty concentration and extermination camps. A couple of years later that number surpassed two million (the subsequent numbers would of course be affected by Covid19). It's easy to dismiss Holocaust tourism as crassly commercial, but it surely plays a large role in terms of education and remembrance. 

The oldest postcard in the book dates from 1947 – only two years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The cards feature innocuous and benign comments like “Everything is fine, all I miss is you and the sun". Another reads: “Shipment of warm greetings from Auschwitz with the rustle of the summer wind, from your sister Cześka.” On the verso is an image of Block 11, the site of the first gassings in August of 1941.

The postcards inadvertently recall another type of communication from the camp: letters from prisoners attempting to reach their families during the war. In order to make it past Nazi censors this correspondence had to be written in German, and obviously omit any reference to the atrocities taking place. For example "…I inform you that I am working as a tailor and that I am doing fine and that I am healthy and I hope to receive your reply soon." 

In June of 2020, the Auschwitz Museum hosted an exhibition of such war-time communication, focussing on twenty-one letters sent by Tadeusz Korczowski, during the 16 months he was imprisoned at the camp. For example: 

“I am healthy and feel good. Please follow the regulations for the exchange of correspondence carefully and write immediately. You are allowed to send money. Next time send more”.

“Please prepare yourself well for winter and Halunia, you should take care of your shoes.”

“Dearest Mum, best and most sincere wishes of happiness on your name day. Best regards and many kisses for all of you. Warmest kisses for you. Yours, Tad.”

These letters had to follow a general template, never failing to mention "I am healthy and I feel good.”

Decades later, the friendly messages scrawled on the back of the tourist postcards in Greetings from Auschwitz share similar, simple sentiments.  "I didn’t get to see Zosie after all. Kisses," reads a card featuring an image of a map from 1946 of the death camp. 

The final image in the book is one of the famous four Sonderkommando photographs - blurry snapshots taken surreptitiously in August 1944. A Greek Jewish prisoner known only as Alex risked his life to take two shots from inside one of the gas chambers, and two outside. Shooting from the hip so as not to arouse suspicion, he was unable to aim the camera with any precision. All photography was forbidden in the camp, and a prisoner caught with a camera would have been executed on the spot. 

His images were smuggled out of the camp by the Polish resistance, inside a tube of toothpaste. Two of the images illustrate the cremation of corpses in a fire pit, the third depicts a group of naked women entering the gas chamber. The final image is a picture of the nearby trees, the result of accidentally aiming the camera too high. 

On the back of the postcard of the gas chamber, a tourist wrote "Warm Greetings from Auschwitz".

These collected postcards - which are still being sold to tourists in Auschwitz today - challenge not only good taste, but almost eighty years of Holocaust discourse. 

Theodor W. Adorno declared "There can be no poetry after Auschwitz" and Stanley Kubrick concluded that a film that truly depicted the horrors of the Holocaust could not be told, without audiences vomiting in the aisles. The art world has grappled with similar questions about what is an appropriate way to examine and discuss the Shoah. 

The juxtaposition between the sombre images of the postcards and the breezy salutations create a jarring dissonance that is difficult to reconcile.