Exchanging “Mementos of Death”: Holocaust Remains in Poland and Japan

1 Polish State Use of Ashes

In July 1947, the Polish parliament adopted a bill which transformed Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, the former concentration and extermination camps into perpetual memorials to the “Martyrdom of the Polish Nation and other nations.” The bill conferred on the museums established at the sites the task of “collecting and gathering evidence and materials on Nazi crimes, making them available to the public and studying them scientifically.”^[9] At the same time, the terrain of both former camps as well as all material structures and remains located therein became subject to expropriation by the State Treasury to be seized and effectively governed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and Arts and the Council for the Protection of Memorials of Martyrdom, instituted by the regime the same year to centralize the commemoration of the Second World War in Poland.^[10] As a result, the national museums emerged as central conduits of the state-sponsored politics of memory, a process analyzed by many in terms of their thorough although ever-changing “politization and instrumentalization,”^[11] “institutionalization”^[12] and narrative and symbolic “monopolization”.^[13] In other words, in the years and decades to come, the Polish state assumed a pivotal role in defining their meanings, both nationally and internationally.

While the 1947 bill converting the former camps into nationally recognized and governed monuments constituted an unquestionable turning point in the history of the sites as national memorial institutions, their transformation into memorial sites commenced immediately upon the liberation by the advancing Soviet Army – in July 1944 in Majdanek and in January 1945 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. This task was undertaken, first, by Polish political prisoners, many of whom remained in the former camps to guarantee their protection and proper commemoration or directly engaged in lobbying with emerging state institutions.^[14] Their wish to establish museums at the former camps was not only welcomed but also reinforced. Already in October 1944, The Polish Committee of National Liberation resolved to establish a museum at Majdanek and envisioned it as a central institution.^[15] A similar decision resulted in Auschwitz-Birkenau being placed under the authority of the Department of Museums and the Museums of Polish Martyrology in May 1945, cementing its future as a “central symbol of Polish martyrdom”.^[16] This gave impetus for the work on museum exhibitions, and their framing developed in a close collaboration between the associations of (mostly) Polish former political prisoners and several state institutions; the involvement of Jewish survivors was, from the outset, severely curtailed.^[17] The first employers of the memorial sites embarked on a task to collect relevant accounts, documents, and material objects for the exhibitions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the early practices evolving and revolving at the sites centered around human remains, which were omnipresent at the camps, hastily abandoned by the Nazis who tried but failed to erase the evidence of the crimes committed at Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Already upon liberation of the camps, human remains discovered therein were subjected to concentrated forensic efforts by Soviet and Polish investigative commissions, which conducted crime scenes visits, inspected body disposal pits and crematory ovens. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, these investigations also included autopsies of hundreds of corpses.^[18] At both camps, the unfragmented and unincinerated and thus easily recognizable human remains were soon thereafter subjected to fairly ceremonious burials: a religiously framed (Christian) mass inhumation of 450 victims of Auschwitz and Birkenau took place on 28 February, 1945.^[19] Also, at Majdanek, the partially destroyed human remains discovered in the vicinity of the crematorium were buried, their grave adorned with a cross – a powerful testimony to the fact that “initially, not only did the communist government tolerate religious forms of commemoration, but even encouraged them”,^[20] further contributing to the erasure of the memory of the Jewish victims.

The forensic investigations of those early commissions expanded, too, to include the sites of disposal and deposition of incinerated human remains, yet their memorial handling was to differ significantly. At Birkenau, where burned remains were routinely thrown into nearby rivers and/or used for construction works, the forensic experts concentrated their efforts on the area surrounding the crematorium V to locate and investigate several pits with ashes and charred bones, but incinerated human remains could be spotted at many locations in the camp.^[21] At Majdanek, the Special Polish-Soviet Commission, which visited the site in August 1944, discovered 15 stacks of “fertilizer” with an overall volume of 1300 m³ in a remote part of the camp designated for agricultural use.^[22] It was quickly established that the stacks contained large quantities of incinerated and pulverized human remains mixed with soil.

The unprecedented material presence of remains on the ground impelled novel responses and the reconfiguration of practices pertaining to the human remains, leading to the emergence and consolidation of new patterns of memorialization distinct from the burial of the dead. This is powerfully evidenced through complex material trajectories of the heaps of ashes discovered at Majdanek. Unlike other remains, the ashes remained in their dispersed locations until several years after the end of the war, which resulted in their extractivist re-materialization as a fertilizer by the local Polish population, as well as in extensive looting (looking for hidden valuables and gold teeth) that occurred, also, in the landscape of Auschwitz-Birkenau.^[23] The need to 'protect' incinerated remains from those violent practices translated into the temporary marking of the heaps of ashes at Majdanek with crosses and warning signs, and, in the longer run, informed a project to collect the remains and relocate them to the area of the camp’s crematorium.^[24] While the possibility of placing human remains in an underground crypt, thus entailing a burial of the ash, was discussed by the officials involved in the commemoration of Majdanek, many leaned toward an architecturally framed display. It was this option that eventually prevailed due to its “greater emotional significance”.^[25] In the spring and summer of 1947, the remains were collected from the dispersed locations and placed together in the form of a 7-m-high mound, which was covered by turf and, some years later, surrounded by a concrete enclosure.^[26] In 1969, the remains were placed in a monumental urn-like mausoleum where they remain to this day, displayed for the visitors – Majdanek being, in fact, the only monument of this kind.

Yet, the ceremonial deposition of the Majdanek ashes, first in the mound and later in the mausoleum, was not the only trajectory of their physical and symbolic movement. The incinerated remains also became subject to multidirectional circulation and dispersal effectuated by the museum itself; this was the case, too, at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the decades following the establishment of the museums at the former camps, incinerated human remains were collected by their employees and other actors, packed into boxes, bags, or urns and given to a variety of memorial institutions, schools, churches, workplaces, and private individuals in Poland and worldwide. Between 1964 and 2006 alone, the State Museum at Majdanek sent or handed over almost 120 urns. Between 1959 and 2004, the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau handed over 710 urns containing soil from the camp mixed with incinerated human remains. The actual number of vessels containing ashes from the camps that were taken from Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau is, in fact, significantly higher.^[27] The emergence of this ‘commemorative idiom’ – although scarcely documented in the archives of both institutions – can be traced back to the immediate postwar period. Several photographs in the archive of the State Museum of Majdanek capture its former director Stanislaw Brodziak in a camp’s crematorium and (most probably) next to one of the heaps of ashes, inserting incinerated human remains into metal urns. The picture was taken at some point in 1945 or 1946.^[28] The first reports about the collection of ashes in Auschwitz-Birkenau known to us come from the press coverage of two religiously and politically framed events organized in June and September of 1945.

The first of the two events, marshaled by the municipality of Oświecim, the Association of former Ideological and Political Prisoners of Concentration Camps and members of socialist youth organization with wartime roots, the Association of Youth Fight (Zwiazek Walki Mlodych, ZWM), gathered hundreds of people, including high ranking state official and former Polish inmates of the camp. The crowd marched from the city center to the location of a grave of the last prisoners erected earlier that year in the vicinity of Auschwitz I and culminated in a Catholic mass in their honor. After several speeches strongly foregrounding the ‘Polishness’ of the victims of the camp, a delegation of the ZWN was proffered an urn with ashes, which, as the article states, was to be carried to Gdansk to adorn the celebration of “Sea Days”, an annual state-organized event dedicated to occupations and activities associated with the Baltic Sea.^[29] The second occasion for the collection of incinerated remains accompanied a ceremony of erecting a wooden cross at the same postwar grave. This event also brought together a multitude of people, including many former Polish wartime political prisoners and families of those who did not survive the war. After the ceremony, those who had not been at the site before visited Birkenau and the ruins of its crematoria. It was there that incinerated human remains were, “with great reverence”, picked from the ground and taken away from the terrain camp.^[30] It is not quite clear, in those two cases, who exactly initiated the practice of scooping and carrying away the ashes – neither is the subsequent fate of the collected remains. But the direct involvement of the director of the museum (Majdanek) as well as the fact that the handing over or gathering of remains accompanied major political events (Auschwitz-Birkenau) indicates that it was from the outset officially sanctioned and framed.^[31] Furthermore, the fact that an urn with ashes was centrally placed at the first Auschwitz exhibition,^[32] where it remains to this very day, makes manifest that by 1947, when it was opened, this treatment of human remains was embraced by the Polish state officials.

The practice of collecting and transferring ash persisted through many major political and memorial transformations in Poland, diligently mirrored in the framings of the camps both in political discourses produced and authorized by the state and in the in situ museum exhibitions. The relative plurality of perspectives on the camps, which defined the early postwar years and translated into a reluctant inclusion of Jewish actors in defining the content of the exhibitions,^[33] was, nerveless, from the outset overshadowed by an attempt to construct them as broader symbols of the suffering of the Polish population under the German occupation shared by the Polish political prisoners and state officials. As rightly argued by Jonathan Heuner, the “polonization” and “dejudeization” of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and thus the erasure of the specificity of the Jewish experience of the camp, was prevalent from the early postwar years.^[34] The increasing centralization of memory politics in the late 1940s and 1950s as well as the tightening party control over the camps imposed a shift towards themes defined by Polish Stalinism and Cold War rhetoric, reframing the camps as sites of international anti-fascist and antiimperialist struggle. After the de-Stalinization in Poland, the internationalization of the camps was facilitated by the work of associations consisting of former political prisoners, such as the International Auschwitz Committee (IAC) established in 1955. Its major achievement was the unveiling of the international memorial in Birkenau in 1967 (again, under tight state control and dominated by the agendas of the Polish political prisoners) and opening of several national exhibitions in Auschwitz.^[35] The international framing, nevertheless, also served to erase memory of the Jewish victims as they were not foregrounded or included in any of the de facto national narratives. While the work of the IAC unquestionably contributed to the popularization of the knowledge about the camp abroad, especially behind the Iron Curtain, in Poland it became, once more, a symbol of (almost exclusively) Polish martyrdom. This nationalist and denialist appropriation was directly reflected in the practices pertaining to human remains, collected, appropriated, and accordingly re-signified in all the described periods and beyond.^[36]

This was greatly facilitated by the fact that the Polish state and its institutions acted as primary custodians of the remains, invested with the authority over their materializations, trajectories, and meanings. This material, symbolic and, in fact, formal ownership (codified in Polish law),^[37] allowed for the institutionalization of the transfer of ash and established its political and mnemonic directionalities. This rendered the incinerated human remains a potent material, symbolic, and political resource in the hands of the museums, which took the task of “making them available to the public”, entrusted to them by the 1947 bill, somewhat too literally.

Archival materials at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek dating back to the 1960s demonstrate a deeply institutionalized if not normalized phenomenon. They report on hundreds of donations of ashes made by the museums for them to be buried elsewhere, incorporated into memorials or exhibited at local Polish schools and other institutions, including factories and community centers, exhibited in museums in the country and abroad, and embedded into buildings used for religious (mostly Christian) worship all over the world. The extensive archival collections contain formalized and standardized protocols of the “handing over of ashes” of the inmates – indicating when, from where, and by whom they were picked up, to whom they were entrusted, and (sometimes) what was to happen to the remains once they left the premises of the memorial landscapes. Often the protocols are accompanied by written requests for ashes sent to the museums by a multitude of actors and organizations eager to acquire the corporeal remains of the victims, which were then sent by post or collected personally. At other times, the handing over took place during a visit to the site undertaken by representatives of other memorial institutions, associations of former inmates or other social and political bodies, who, in the presence of the employees of the museum, put the ashes into makeshift bags, boxes and urns to travel with them to various destinations, or were given a ready-made urn by the museum.

In fact, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, such a standardized urn was introduced at some point in the 1960s – before that the petitioners were advised either to collect the ashes themselves, or to send the museum a “worthy packaging”.^[38] This was probably the result of the intervention by the Directorate of Museums and Monument Preservation, a unit of the Ministry of Culture and Art in the summer of 1960. The Directorate informed the head of State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau that a transfer of an urn to Belgium – an intended gift for an association of Belgian political prisoners through the Belgian embassy in Warsaw – was halted by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs due to “the packaging [which] was inadequate for the content”.^[39] The remains were, therefore, returned to the museum, which was obliged to provide a new package.

The content of the packaging was, in turn, quite clearly defined by the standardized protocols issued by both museums, although their framings differed slightly. Whereas the protocol submitted by the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum constructed its content as “soil and ashes collected in front of the execution wall of Block 11 (in Auschwitz I) and from the crematory pyres in Brzezinka (that is, Birkenau)” that belonged to “those killed in the Hitlerite camp”, the certificate produced by Majdanek was, at once, more specific and more vague about the identity of the dead whose bodies were contained in the urns. It claimed that the ashes belonged to “citizens of 26 countries and 51 nationalities” murdered at the camp.^[40] While this served to reflect the international character of the camp and enhanced the potential for significance of the nationally and internationally distributed ash, this framing – in line with the dominant Polish memory politics of the time – also effectively erased the fact that the majority of those killed in Majdanek died because the Nazis constructed them as Jewish – a matter on which the Auschwitz-Birkenau certificate (strategically) remained silent.

This is perhaps not surprising since most of the incinerated remains from the former camps journeyed locally across Poland. Packed in urns, they were inserted into material, symbolic, and political spaces in memorial chambers, predominantly those established in Polish schools, which proliferated in the country in the state socialist period (especially from the 1960s onward) to promote the historical and patriotic education of the youth. Similar chambers were created all over Poland by local branches of the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (ZBOiD), a state-controlled association of veterans, many of whom had been political prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps.^[41] But the practice of expanding the commitment to remember the camps and its victims through the material dispersal of incinerated remains had an important global dimension as well. The urns traveled to many countries in the Eastern bloc but also crossed borders, including Cold War borders: urns were given to museums or organizations in Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, and those in Canada, United States, Brazil, and, in our case, Japan. Many urns were handed over to Polish diasporic organizations abroad. And although Jewish individuals and organizations, including some major Holocaust museums emerging in the 1980s and 1990s, also participated in the practice, this happened on a significantly smaller scale in comparison with their Polish counterparts.

The practice of handing over incinerated remains instituted, in other words, a ‘secular’ network of pilgrimage sites with its own ‘relics’, altars, and memory chambers in schools, workplaces, churches, museums, and memorials all over the world. It was enabled, first and foremost, by the unique material affordances of ash and, indeed, effectively enhanced their relic-like quality, relying on their material conditions as fragmentary and dismembered remains: their durability and resistance to further decay, their portability and mobility, their small size and scale.^[42] The relic-like status of ashes was, in this sense, grounded as much in their fragile material composition, which made them easily movable across time and space, as in their provenance in the camps and their subsequent material trajectories. But the resonance between the circulation of ashes and the circulation of relics also sheds light on the politics of the secularized postwar practice. Relics are often portrayed in scholarship as a potent symbolic capital, mobilized to consolidate and legitimize power and specific politically charged narratives of the past. This was the case, too, with the incinerated remains circulating between the museum and the network of sites entrusted with the ashes from the camps. On the one hand, the transfer of incinerated remains allowed for the memory of the camps to spread and consolidate, supporting hegemonic narratives around the war in Poland and casting the ashes in the role of “conductors of patriotic feeling”.^[43] On the other, it granted legitimacy to the locally emerging memorial sites, the ashes often being the material and symbolic focal point around which they were structured. The circulation of urns with incinerated human remains was also a means of securing, and making manifest, the (one) directionality of the mnemonic radiance: many memorial institutions in the country and abroad depended on the donation, a modality of “death diplomacy”, that firmly positioned Poland, and the museums established at the former camps, on the landscape of institutional, globalizing remembrance of the Second World War. Moreover, the circulation of the urns contributed to the consolidation of Auschwitz as a global symbol in contexts of other past and unfolding instances of political violence, anticolonial and antiimperialist struggles throughout the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s, including Apartheid South Africa,^[44] Cambodia, and Vietnam.^[45] While in some of these contexts “Auschwitz”, indeed, signified (also) the genocide against the Jews, this was not the meaning attributed to it and to the urns by the Polish state museums.

When Japanese activists reached out to their Polish counterparts, there was, therefore, already a well-established narrative and institutional network that facilitated the transfer of ashes from Poland. Crucially, the meaning attached to the urns was set by the dominant Polish narrative communicated abroad as part of an international struggle against fascism and for peace. The human remains were constructed as victims but also as belonging to a greater, active political struggle against the forces of reaction, imperialism, and war (identified primarily with the Cold War West). Ironically, in Poland itself, such Stalinist readings have largely died out in the late fifties, giving space to a straightforward nationalist interpretation of the war. Some of this duality remained in Japanese-Polish exchanges. However, there was a convergence between Japanese and Polish understandings of (what we now call) the Holocaust, which resulted in the actual erasure of its specificity as racially and antisemitically motivated violence against the Jews. In the following, we retrace in detail the passage of several urns between Poland and Japan to show how the commemorative idiom that developed around human remains figured in and, in fact, facilitated memorial relationality between Hiroshima and Auschwitz.

2 The Hiroshima-Auschwitz Peace March

The first urn containing Auschwitz-Birkenau victims’ ashes was brought to Hiroshima by a Japanese activist group, the Hiroshima Auschwitz Peace March, who sought to connect Hiroshima and Auschwitz as part of a struggle against what they saw as the twin dangers of reemergence of fascism at home and nuclear war abroad. The Peace March emerged from the connections between Polish and Japanese groups, as well as a conjunction between early postwar views concerning the Holocaust and Jews in general in Japan and Poland. It is not our intention here to sketch the full history of the march here.^[46] Focusing on the urn, however, this section situates the transfer of ashes within this larger history in Japan, explores the many interests and agendas behind it, and sets the stage for later discussions.

The Peace March was launched in July 1961 at the World Religious Leaders Peace Conference in Kyoto.^[47] Jan Frankowski, a Polish Roman-Catholic priest, was among those present at the conference, and, in conjunction with Buddhist priest Satō Gyōtsū and journalist Satō Yuki, he initiated the call for forming a peace pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau.^[48] For the peace march activists, the Holocaust and its victims were not primarily Jewish, nor was the event or its victims thought of separately from other victims of the Second World War. As Kato Ariko and others argued, this line of thinking enabled these activists to connect and equate the suffering of Japanese victims of war, namely those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the wartime Nazi atrocities epitomized by “Auschwitz” as their symbol. This corresponded with general Japanese peace movement discourse, which emphasized the experience of war victimization as its foundation.^[49] Such conception of Auschwitz and Japanese war experience contained multiple contradictions and was as much an act of erasure (of Jews as well as of Japan’s Asian victims) as one of remembrance, yet it became the dominant view among Japanese activists. This interpretation fitted very well with the contemporary Polish understanding of the Second World War and of the Nazi camps. And, significantly, it was the Polish state rather than Jewish groups that was the partner for the joint commemoration of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Japan.

Japanese knowledge of the Holocaust, of course, was not limited to Polish-Japanese connections. Most information on the Holocaust came to Japan through translated works and dated to the early and mid-fifties from various sources, yet engagement with the topic was minimal.^[50] To many Japanese, any real knowledge of the Holocaust came only during the Adolf Eichmann trial in the early 1960s. The trial occurred shortly after the massive anti-Japanese American security treaty (ANPO) demonstrations in which all march activists took part, and in the background of repeated Cold War crises in Berlin and the Taiwan straits. The trial was seen through the lens of the problem of totalitarianism and Japan’s own history of authoritarianism, as well as the left’s fears of being dragged to U.S.-led war in Asia. Within Japanese intellectuals and activists circles, the experience of the camps was seen, therefore, as a lesson for an anti-fascist struggle, closely associated with the call for peace and nuclear disarmament.

This mindset was the main impetus for the launch of the Hiroshima-Auschwitz initiative, which directly connected both atrocities. “Recalling the unjust plans for the extermination of inferior ethnic groups and the crimes of fascism,” the activists declared in Kyoto, “we seek to remind the entire global community not to allow such things to happen again.”^[51] Yet, the marchers’ vow of “never again” positioned Hiroshima and Auschwitz as comparable tragedies primarily within the context of war and fascism, and not racial persecution. “Inferior ethnic groups” were mentioned, but Jews were not. Unlike the Polish side, Japanese activists were not against the emphasis and inclusion of Jewish suffering, but this was not the primary category of interpretation. Thus, although Poles and Japanese saw “fascism” and “imperialism” slightly differently (in Poland, it was mostly Western Germany and not the U.S. that was considered in these terms), the convergence of language and the basic understanding of what transpired in Auschwitz-Birkenau as primarily political rather than racial prosecution allowed for a common language of commemoration.

This consensus was on full display when the Japanese group arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau and took part in the liberation ceremony on 27 January 1963, setting the stage for the handing over of the ashes. The marchers were state guests in Poland, and, when in Auschwitz, they were placed at the head of the column of mourners. Surrounded by former political prisoners who were dressed in camp uniforms, Satō Gyōtsu chanted the sutras and performed the rites for the dead. Then the secretary general of the International Auschwitz Committee (IAC), Tadeusz Hołuj, gave a speech where he told the crowd in a language very similar to the marchers’ Kyoto appeal, “We, survivors of Auschwitz from all corners of the world, appeal to people worldwide for the cries of the victims who fell in Auschwitz and Hiroshima. We appeal for the peace and friendship of those who entrusted their last words to us as they died. We will never stop this appeal as long as the danger of a new war persists.”^[52] In return, the Japanese “vowed to tell the people of Europe and Asia [about the atrocities] to prevent the repetition of atomic warfare symbolized by Hiroshima and the inhumanity and war crimes of fascism symbolized by Auschwitz.”^[53]

Then, in an act which a Japanese journalist called “exchanging mementos of death,” the marchers received “from the director of the Auschwitz Museum [Kazimierz Smoleń] an empty Zyklon [B] gas can, fabric woven by the Nazis from the hair of victims, and shoes of children who were killed.” The marchers, in turn, presented the Poles with artifacts from Hiroshima.^[54] Following this, Hołuj solemnly “handed the head of the march an urn [containing] the cremated remains (ikotsu) of Auschwitz” prisoners,”^[55] in a gesture that was by no means new to him. The urn had the inverted triangle of political prisoners, and bore the inscription “Oświęcim – Brzezinka” (Auschwitz-Birkenau in Polish), and the years 1940–1945 when the camps were operational (Figure 2). The triangle, which was used on non-Jewish prisoners, marked the urn as Polish. This marking, and Hołuj’s speech erased (the very probable) Jewish identity of the victims whose human remains it contained and presented Auschwitz-Birkenau as primarily a site of Polish suffering and international anti-fascist resistance. The presentation of the Auschwitz remains added solemnity and an air of religiosity (already highlighted by Satō’s sutras) to the exchange. The urn was supposed to be buried in Hiroshima alongside A-bomb victims to cement the bond between the two countries.

Figure 2:

Satō Gyōtsu with the urn on his back during a protest march during the group’s return to Hiroshima. Nara, Japan. 1963, photo courtesy of Kajimura Shinjo and Kato Yuzo.

Appropriately and symbolically, the urn was carried on Sato’s back in a cloth in the exact way that ashes of the Japanese war dead were brought back home from the continent (Figure 3). Whether Satō, a former Imperial army soldier, did this intentionally is unclear. The image of a Buddhist priest carrying a box of ashes, however, was a familiar sight for that generation of Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of such urns made the journey during and after the war from the battlefields of Asia to Japan. Similar boxes were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan had its own postwar history of collecting and repatriating the remains of war victims, whether that of Japan’s own or of the millions of Japanese that died overseas.^[56] This final act marked the ultimate conflation and “flattening out” of identities between Polish political prisoners, Hiroshima victims, the unnamed Imperial soldiers, and the Jewish victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, now all marked as universal victims of war – the urn was, again, re-signified, to match the interests, imagining and agendas of its new ‘owners’.

Figure 3:

The urn brought by the Polish delegation to Japan as part of the 1972 exhibit, photo courtesy of Kajimura Shinjo and Kato Yuzo.

When the group returned to Hiroshima in August 1963, however, the Polish embassy decided to again re-mark the ashes as Polish and sent a representative to greet the marchers as they presented the urn to Hiroshima’s mayor Hamai Shinzō, requesting that it be interned in the Peace Park. In the presence of the Polish embassy delegation and other dignitaries, the mayor respectfully received the remains, only to return them to the activists the following week. The city argued they had “no space” for the remains and that, for now, it would not be possible to erect any new memorials in the Peace Park.^[57] Although the reasons behind the rejection were complex, they mostly stemmed from the supposed communist affiliation of the march and the identity of the remains as “anti-fascist”, and thus unfit for an official burial. This led to the rather awkward question of what to do with the urn. Satō and his affiliates contacted Kuwahara Hideki, a Catholic priest who headed the Hiroshima Religious Association, and together they issued a call for people of faith to help them deal with the situation. Satō Tetsuro from the Hiroshima Mitaki temple stepped forward and offered to keep the remains. The following month, Satō Tetsuro, Kuwahara and others conferred and decided to set up a permanent body, the Hiroshima Auschwitz Committee (HAC) which would take care of the remains and work to erect a memorial in Mitaki.^[58]

Kuwahara, who became an important actor in the Hiroshima-Auschwitz connections, had his own agenda in receiving the urn. Conflating, yet again, the remains of the supposed anti-fascist heroes now with those of Catholic martyrs, namely that of Maximilian Kolbe – a Polish priest who died in Auschwitz, he sought to leverage the commemoration of the Auschwitz-Birkenau remains to promote connections with Polish Catholics and the Vatican. Catholic and religious connections, through the figure of Jan Frankowski, were quite important in the Hiroshima-Auschwitz link, and Kolbe was another one. Kolbe, who became a post-war Polish national hero and a saint, resided in Nagasaki until shortly before the war, and was well-known in Japanese Catholic circles (but perhaps not as well as in Poland, where his antisemitic worldview was, nevertheless, not subject to much public concern). Kuwahara hoped he could use the Mitaki campaign to get the Pope to visit Hiroshima and connect the church with the Mitaki commemoration effort.^[59] Furthermore, the Mitaki priest Satō Tetsuro saw his participation as part of his agenda to enshrine foreign remains side by side with the Hiroshima remains the temple holds to enhance its message and international appeal. Paradoxically, this religious reframing did not contradict the ascription of identity conferred to the Auschwitz urn by the Polish officials. Instead, this ‘Catholicization’ further reinforced the assumed ‘Polishness’ of the remains.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau ashes were eventually buried in Mitaki in December 1973. The burial campaign unfolded within a complex network of meanings and a hodgepodge of symbolisms where different agendas were all subsumed into an amorphous “sacrifice” that was part of a commemorative, religious (or anti-fascist depending on the context) effort to prevent war. Another, more immediate concern of all parties was the use of the remains as a resource and a symbolic capital to connect their various agendas with the network they sought to construct with both Hiroshima and Auschwitz aspiring to be at their center. The urn and its transcontinental passage were instrumental in this process. Not only did the material transfer of ash from the Polish state institution to the hands of Japanese activists cement the exchange, but it also transformed the urn and its contents into a polysemic, and inherently transactional, symbolic vehicle. And while it could be argued that the burial at Mitaki was a sign of respect for the dead whose human remains it contained, their very trajectory and reframing (including the politically motivated refusal to inhume the urn in the Hiroshima Peace Park) speak, rather, to a multilayered dynamic of appropriation, objectification, and instrumentalization enacted as much in Poland as in Japan. Reduced to transferable “mementos of death”, the human remains were neither affirmed in their humanness nor fully recognized in their identity and, therefore, subjected to treatment (potentially) violating both the wishes and cultural and religious sensitivities of the people to whom they belonged in the first place.

3 The 1972 Auschwitz Exhibit

The Hiroshima Auschwitz Committee sought to do more than simply build a memorial for the urns in Mitaki. The committee saw itself as an important part of an international movement. Yamada Setsuo, who became Hiroshima’s mayor in the mid-1960s, was an influential backer of the group. Yamada was an enthusiastic supporter of the World Federalist Movement and also chaired the newly formed Hiroshima–Poland Cultural Association, created with the blessing of the Polish embassy in Tokyo,^[60] and fixed through further donations of urns from Auschwitz-Birkenau. These connections meant that going into the 1970s, the dominant interpretation of the urns and the greater exchange with Poland were still, at least from the Japanese side, firmly internationalist and socialist leaning. What was conspicuously lacking, given early emphasis on “anti-fascism”, was any overt anti-Americanism in the committee’s work. Unlike the marchers, the committee was an establishment affiliated body, and it maintained a rather ambiguous position regarding U.S. responsibility for the A-bomb. The Japanese did not fully embrace the Polish erasure and appropriation of the Holocaust either. However, the framing of the remains as Jewish was secondary and, in general, was subsumed under the universalist rubric that allowed for the Polish-Japanese exchange in the first place.

On 16 August 1969, The HAC visited Auschwitz-Birkenau where they were presented with a second urn containing “a handful of ashes of those killed in the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau”.^[61] This visit was part of a number of exchanges that included sister-city agreements between Oświęcim and Hiroshima, aimed at solidifying the Hiroshima-Auschwitz connection.^[62] Another result of these connections was the Polish decision to send a major exhibit to Japan. Archival evidence suggests that the initiative came from Japan, but the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum dedicated serious resources to the endeavor – the exhibition was conceptualized and designed by a Polish team consisting mostly of the museum employees with the support of the ICA, whose engagement guaranteed the Polish state approval.^[63] The stated objective of the exhibition was to “familiarize Japanese society with the martyrology of the Polish nation and other nations during the Hitlerite occupation of Europe through the prism of the Auschwitz camp.”^[64] The European frame served, nevertheless, mostly as a background for a more detailed discussion on the Polish war losses, affording them, according to the script, a “special status”. But the exhibition was also meant to foreground similarities between memorial institutions established at Auschwitz-Birkenau and in Hiroshima as “symbols of the struggle for peace”, and to stage their long-lasting collaboration. This was achieved, amongst others, by display of a lengthy quote from 1963, left in a memorial book in the Polish state museum by Sato, and a photographic documentation of the 1963 ceremony with the Peace March.

Testifying to the high profile and importance of the exchange as well as the rising awareness of the Holocaust in Japan, the Auschwitz Exhibit was sponsored by one of Japan’s leading newspapers, the Asahi Shinbun, and was shown in 10 different cities. The exhibit was a smashing success. The German-language bulletin of the IAC reported in September 1972 that “until the end of June this year a total of 714,000 people visited the exhibition … The Japanese people received the exhibition with sincere interest and deep reverence,” as evidenced by the visitors’ notes and reactions. The IAC bulletin also reported that the Polish representative presented to mayor Yamada an “urn with the ashes of the victims of Auschwitz and a handful of earth from the camp [site].” After the exhibition ended, this urn, too, was buried in the Mitaki Temple.^[65]

This matter-of-fact presentation of yet another urn of Auschwitz-Birkenau victims to Hiroshima (the third one since 1963) attests to the almost routine nature of such exchanges by 1972, and to the increasing normalization of transfer and public display of human remains from Auschwitz-Birkenau in Japan. The urn was shown at the exhibition and accompanied it across the country. This was, in fact, stipulated by the script of the exhibition as conceptualized by the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau: the urn filled with soil and the ashes of the victims was to be one meter high and constructed from a transparent material to make the remains clearly visible (eventually, a different project was implemented; the urn in the exhibit catalog is made out of iron - Figure 4). Interestingly, unlike other objects from Auschwitz-Birkenau, this element of the exhibition was left narratively unframed. “Due to the symbolism”, stated the script – and, one can assume, the self-referentiality of the urn in the broader context of the exhibition – “no explanatory inscription was foreseen.”^[66] The way the victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, symbolized by the nameless remains inside the urn, were spoken off and the way violence was explained also conformed to the established rhetoric of Auschwitz and Hiroshima as equivalent human tragedies. Though the emphasis in Japan was more on the universal aspect of the tragedy, in this telling it was the Japanese and Poles who were the main victims endowed by the experience with a mission to warn the world and tell its lessons.

Figure 4:

A page from the 1972 brochure of the Auschwitz Exhibition. The urn is in the bottom (Source: The Hiroshima–Auschwitz Committee).

The Polish representative, Emeryka Iwaszko, astutely played the same tune of Auschwitz as “Hiroshima in a faraway land,” explaining Auschwitz to the Japanese in words they could immediately relate to. When she handed the urn to Mayor Yamada, she said that “the remains are given to the citizens of Hiroshima as a ‘testament to peace’ (heiwa e no akashi) from the [Auschwitz] Museum.”^[67] Similarly, in her speech in the Hiroshima museum, she told the audience “Auschwitz, or Oświecim in Polish, has become a symbol for the Polish people, just as Hiroshima is a symbol of the Japanese people’s desire for peace.” Iwaszko added to this description a hefty dose of Polish victimization narrative describing Poles as equal to, if not greater, victims of Nazi persecution than the Jews, telling the assembled delegates, “A sixth of Poland prewar population perished … [as the] Nazis practiced racist prosecution against Jews, gypsies, and Poles and aimed at these [groups’] extermination.”^[68]

The HAC published a companion book of essays to the exhibit in which Iwaszko continued the same line of argument, mentioning Jewish victims in passing while emphasizing Polish suffering. She asserted, for instance, that the first inmates of Auschwitz were victims of Nazi suppression of Polish resistance and added that “the list of victims listed Slavic peoples as well as Jews and Gypsies.”^[69] From there she moved on to stress the international character of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the fact that from mid-1941, inmates from all occupied European countries were imprisoned in the camp.^[70] Iwaszko did acknowledge, almost grudgingly and emphasizing the citizenship of Jewish victims, that “of the detainees of various nationalities, the largest number of people lost were Polish nationals (Poles and Jews), followed by Soviet citizens. However, the largest number of non-Polish inmates overall were Jews from various countries.”^[71] Afterwards, she immediately moved to discuss Polish underground resistance to the Nazis in the camp and surrounding countryside, and the heroic deeds of “Polish and Soviet soldiers who liberated the remaining prisoners of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945.”^[72]

The Japanese contributors to the volume also stuck to their ideological guns. In their greetings, Kuwahara and Yamada opened with the usual refrain of “Like Hiroshima, Auschwitz in Europe is also a symbol of the suffering of war,” and that they “sincerely hope that this exhibition will contribute in some small way to the search for peace among mankind, as well as to reflection on the causes of war from the bottom of hearts.”^[73] A similar interpretation was given by Shimoyama Tokuji, the Japanese translator of Victor Frankl, who emphasized the political nature of Nazi crimes and its universal lesson, and ruminated about humans’ inborn aggression and “humanity’s light and shadow.”^[74] A different take was proposed by Kotani Tsuruji, a well-known author and anti-Vietnam War activist. Unlike all other contributors, Kotani emphasized the racial aspect of Nazi persecution, writing that “many Japanese people must be aware of the fact that Auschwitz represents a different kind of war disaster from Hiroshima.” He reminded that Hitler ultimately sought to eliminate Jews from the earth and “that this had nothing to do with any kind of military objectives and it differed from Hiroshima where noncombatants were targeted to achieve a strategic goal [i.e. Japanese surrender].”^[75] Kotani’s contribution was the only one to acknowledge the specificity of the Jewish experience of the camps and the essential difference between the Holocaust and many other instances of political violence, Hiroshima and the prosecution of the Polish political prisoners included.

While indirectly framing the urn with human remains of Auschwitz-Birkenau, none of the authors endeavored to ruminate on the implications of their actual material presence in Japan. Their presence was marked by their absence. Neither the circulation of human remains nor the display in the Japanese museums was reflected upon and problematized – a testimony to thorough normalization and naturalization of the logic of the Polish commemorative idiom, which took root also in Japan. Moreover, the circulation of ashes between Poland and Japan, instantiated in the 1960s, paved the way for their exhibition and materialization as museum objects. Transformed into corpus delicti of the Nazi crimes and a postwar “testament to peace” (Iwaszko) – and transitional vehicles performatively connecting Auschwitz and Hiroshima –, human remains, seemingly honored, were once more politically instrumentalized. After they played their role, they were, again, buried in Mitaki.

4 Coda: John Paul II’s 1982 Visit to Hiroshima

In 1982, John Paul II visited Japan and Hiroshima to deliver a message of peace. In the context of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Polish Pope played a highly ambiguous role. The 1979 papal mass in Auschwitz is seen as a turning point in the history of the former camp and what it meant for Poles.^[76] The Roman Catholic view of Auschwitz as a site of Polish martyrdom, in opposition to state socialist interpretations, received a boost through the beatification of the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe in 1971. The papal mass was an opportunity for solidarity and a chance for others to reclaim Auschwitz-Birkenau as a symbol of both Polish and Jewish suffering and a universal symbol of human rights in opposition to the regime.^[77] This message was, of course, problematic for the Polish state which at the time was not only slowly loosing grip on the dominant narrative of the camp but also on the Polish society at large.

None of these ambiguities were present in Hiroshima where the Vatican, which was one of the first to condemn the U.S. attack on the city in 1945, was quite popular and where Catholic organizations long supported Hiroshima causes. Accordingly, the HAC and Kuwahara, who courted Catholic circles for decades, were ecstatic about the visit of John Paul II to Hiroshima. The Japan Catholic Association, official host of the papal visit, and the HAC, saw it as an opportunity to achieve its long-term goal of cementing ties with the Vatican.^[78] The Auschwitz-Birkenau remains were, again, mobilized as a vehicle to achieve this goal. Nevertheless, this time, to make the symbolic connection work, the directionality of the passage had to be reversed: the Pope was to be given an urn with Auschwitz ashes from Mitaki.

The idea to present the Pope with the ashes from Auschwitz-Birkenau was initiated by Matsumoto Kaname, a Catholic activist in the HAC. The ashes were unearthed by the HAC, divided (bunkotsu – a Buddhist term; depositing one’s ashes in different sacred places is acceptable in Buddhism) and bestowed upon the Pope in front of the cenotaph in the Hiroshima Peace Park.^[79] The audience was not planned, and the Pope had no idea what was in the package presented to him. According to a local Hiroshima newspaper, as the Pope approached the cenotaph, he “was suddenly given a box of ashes from among the worshippers that contained ashes from the Auschwitz camp [in] his native Poland (bokoku no Poranndo).” The ashes, according to Matsumoto, were the ones given to the HAC by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in 1969 as a “cornerstone of peace”. Matsumoto and Kuwahara handed the ashes to the Pope and requested his blessing of the remains. The Pope, surprised, asked Matsumoto, “are those [ashes] your family’s remains?” Matsumoto explained the situation to the Pope, who “nodded and made the sign of the cross touching the bones with his right hand.”^[80]

It is not clear if the Pope received the bones. The newspaper account spoke only of the Pope giving his blessing to the urn. When asked, Satō Horunobu as well denied that any ashes were taken out of Japan and insisted that all urns from Auschwitz-Birkenau were still in Mitaki.^[81] But, according to Kuwahara, who specifically confirmed the current location of the urn to the authors, the ashes are now in the Vatican, “thanks to the sincere and courageous efforts (kyoushinzō) of Matsumoto.”^[82] Like the hundreds of other urns that were sent from Nazi camps in Poland around the world, the precise whereabouts of this particular set remains unknown. If, indeed, the 1968 urn is in the Vatican, it joins many others that were sent to churches and clergymen around the world. The confused exchange in front of the cenotaph in the Peace Park was the culmination of a long series of journeys in which putatively Jewish remains swapped hands between parties that were not always completely clear about their mutual and competing meanings.

The commemorative idiom that legitimized the handing over and use of (probable) Jewish remains and their travels between non-Jewish entities and actors took different forms as the ashes were brought to Japan and mobilized to promote multiple agendas from international law to the anti-nuclear struggle, the post-1960 anti-fascist (read anti-American and American-allied) campaigns as well as Catholic universalist connections. But regardless of all these agendas, both in Japan and Poland, where the commemorative idiom was much more widespread, the use of Holocaust ashes as ‘relics’ was normalized and incorporated into the commemoration of the Auschwitz atrocities. But as meanings intersected and converged when Poles and Japanese spoke about the urn as containing the ashes of victims of a struggle against fascism and for peace, the precise meaning and identity of “victims,” “fascism,” and even “peace” remained generally unclear. It had to be continuously signified and re-signified by making the remains appropriately meaningful through performative and discursive acts of abstraction, appropriation, and/or erasure. The circulation of ashes, however, allowed Polish and Japanese actors to, time and again, reiterate around them the narratives of peace, suffering, and struggle – perhaps unsurprisingly, in both countries this unfolded at the cost of a more complex engagement with their wartime perpetratorship. The movement of Holocaust ashes, we argued, was instrumental in this process.

One particular caveat, however, was that this attitude did not extend to Hiroshima ashes. To the best of our knowledge, no comparable circulation and enshrinement of A-bomb remains happened beyond the stricken cities. Auschwitz and other Holocaust victims, however, were another matter. This lacuna is quite telling. Japanese veteran and peace groups, as well as the Japanese government and municipalities, have engaged in decades-long campaigns of identifying, repatriating, and properly burying millions of remains of war and bombing across Japan and the Asia–Pacific. Yet, in Japan, Holocaust victims were nameless and seen as no more than symbols, something that could be mobilized for this or that agenda. In Poland, in turn, the namelessness of the victims facilitated their swift and durable interception as Polish. This form of the political mobilization of human remains, as we argued in relation to the development of the contentious commemorative idiom in early postwar Poland, also rested in the specific material qualities of incinerated human remains that precludes their identification and reconstitution into clearly defined individual beings and troubles any unequivocal ascription of identity and ownership. And yet, those material qualities by no means erase the human dimension of human remains inherent to the ephemeral corporeality of the dead as ash.^[83] This human dimension was denied, rather, by the very practice of material circulation of incinerated remains instrumentalized for memorial and political purposes. To put it bluntly, in the commemorative idiom, which resulted in the decades-long material dispersal of the Holocaust ashes, veneration went hand in hand with violence, the subjectification of human remains with their objectification into “mementos of death” or “cornerstone/testimony of peace”, the declarative honoring of the (not quite correctly defined or identified) dead with their instrumentalization and extractivist rematerialization – as much in Poland as in Japan.