Eighty years after the end of World War II, Holocaust remembrance has become less about history and more about narrative – who shapes it, who tells it, and who gets to decide what it means.
Last fall, I traveled to Poland as part of a German-funded research project focused on Holocaust-era film and photography. Our work explores how visual materials from the time – films and photos of fragments of atrocities – have been appropriated over the past 80 years in different countries, in movies, in museums, and inmemorials. But at Auschwitz and Birkenau, what stood out wasn’t just what we saw. It was what we didn’t hear.
At Auschwitz, you cannot enter without a guide. Ours, a Polish woman, would accompany us for two days. The tour was conducted in German and tailored to our group.
Before stepping inside the gates, she pointed to the iron sign that reads “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”) and drew our attention to the inverted letter “b” in “Arbeit.” It was, she explained, a deliberate act of resistance by Jan Liwacz, a Polish prisoner and blacksmith who forged the sign.
This was our symbolic entry to the site: Auschwitz framed not through its victims, but through subtle Polish defiance.
The tour unfolded as an uninterrupted monologue lasting nearly five hours. The guide covered the camp’s establishment, the categories of prisoners, the architecture of imprisonment, methods of torture, and escape attempts. The suffering was detailed, but curiously neutral in tone. At one point, we passed photographs of victims, hung along a corridor wall. “Were these Jewish victims?” I asked. “There are also Jews among them,” she replied – and continued.
This was not omission by accident. It was omission by design. The narrative was meticulously curated for a German audience – rich in logistical detail, sparse in emotional resonance. What was presented to us was a story of a camp system, of administrative brutality, of war and repression. But not of genocide.
When I asked whether all tours followed this structure, the guide explained that Israeli groups are treated differently. Only their tours are guided by Israelis, and they focus more on the emotional weight of the Holocaust, more on the victims. “It’s much more sensitive,” she said. “Much more emotional. The rest have the same tour.” The implication was clear: the Holocaust, depending on who you are, is either a tragedy to be mourned or a history to be managed.
Inside Block 27, the pavilion curated by Yad Vashem, a different atmosphere briefly surfaced. Screens played raw footage from across Europe: starving bodies, forced labor, executions. But again, no context. No captions. No explanation. Just image after image in succession. We were told the site itself doesn’t provide information, only guides do. Without a guide, a visitor sees horror without meaning. With the wrong guide, they may walk away with a version of history in which Jewish suffering is just one of many threads.
Control the narrative
The next day at Birkenau, our guide referred to the site as “the largest Jewish cemetery in the world.” This time, the narrative leaned more explicitly into extermination. Yet again, it felt cautious, curated. At one point, she told us: “The content is transmitted to us from above and we fulfill these expectations. There is not much information available at the sites, so the visitor depends on us to tell the story. Only we are responsible for the narrative. We want to control the narrative.”
That sentence stayed with me. Control the narrative.
As she spoke, a group of Israeli teens walked past, waving flags and wearing kippot. Their guide called out to them in Hebrew. They, too, were on a guided tour but were confined to their path, their version, their time slot. We were all walking the same grounds, but experiencing different Holocausts.
Eighty years after the Holocaust, the memory of the Jewish tragedy on Polish soil has been placed in a kind of historical ghetto – confined, isolated, surrounded by narratives not its own. The images are there. The names are there. But the voices of the victims are growing fainter, replaced by curated scripts and neutral tones.
As the last survivors pass away, what remains must not be a hollowed-out version of history, not a timeline of camps and train tracks, but the truth of what happened: the targeted, systematic annihilation of six million Jews. The lessons of that horror must be specific before they can be universal.
In Auschwitz today, there is still one Jew who opens the synagogue every morning and prays alone. Most of the time, he is the only one there. His quiet act is not just one of faith, it is a final act of resistance. Against forgetting. Against silence. Against someone else telling our story.
The writer is a researcher at the European Forum at Hebrew University, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which funds the development of an application to track the usage of historical footage and conduct archeological research of historical footage and photos from the Holocaust.