This year marks seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz. An architectural competition announced at the end of last year was timed to coincide with this date, inviting architects around the world to think about creating a new memorial center. Now in Auschwitz there is a museum complex, created shortly after the war, in 1947, in the surviving barracks of Auschwitz II - Birkenau, which is considered a kind of epicenter of events, since it was there that three quarters of all victims of the concentration camp died (more than a million out of a million four hundred).
The new memorial center, according to the competition assignment, should be located near the territory of the former Auschwitz I camp, and now - the quiet and modern center of Auschwitz, a small Polish town for forty thousand inhabitants, where nothing reminds of the events of those years. And the composition of the future center, according to the terms of the competition, should, in addition to the memorial museum, include many socially significant spaces: a large assembly hall, a theater, creative workshops and classrooms.
The heads of the Arch group bureau Alexei Goryainov and Mikhail Krymov, initially inspired by the idea of designing the Auschwitz museum as such, later came to the conclusion that the proposed task distracts the participants from the memory of the great tragedy - and refused to participate in the competition. Not participating in the competition, the architects nevertheless created their own project of the Auschwitz museum, exclusively memorial, embodying in this work their ideas about this kind of exposition. Thus, a project that is not focused either on implementation or even on participation in a competition can be classified as a “paper project” - in fact, it is a conceptual study of an important topic.
In their project, Alexey Goryainov and Mikhail Krymov set up a museum near the walls of the Auschwitz II camp preserved in the existing memorial complex. The architects stretched the galleries of their museum with a thin thread along the road leading to the camp, and the main museum space was hidden underground so as not to distract visitors from the view of the camp with its long fences and gloomy barracks. Only the upper gallery is brought to the surface. It is completely glass and in shape itself resembles a barrack, and therefore does not stand out from the environment.
"Vaccination against evil" - this is how the authors call their project, proposing, in their own words, to revise the very essence of traditional Holocaust museums. There, museum expositions, as a rule, are based on experiences, stories and photographs of victims, and each visitor, imbued with a sense of horror, involuntarily puts himself in their place. It is psychologically very difficult to visit such museums. Not all people are able to see even a small part of the exhibitions. Mikhail Krymov explains: “The victim does not choose his fate. But people become executioners voluntarily, making their own choices and sometimes not noticing where the point of no return is. It is not customary to talk about executioners in such places, but, unfortunately, almost every visitor to this museum, placed in certain conditions, could be not only in the place of the victim, but also in the place of the executioner. A documentary portrayal of the results of what happened and how ordinary people become their perpetrators will be able to prevent new crimes.”
Psychological research, conducted both after the war and recently, successfully confirms one of the common truths: evil exists in each of us. For example, in Asch's experiment, 75% of the subjects easily agreed with the deliberately erroneous opinion of the majority. In Milgram's experiment, 87.5% of the subjects "killed" the victim with an electric shock, simply obeying the authority of the scientist. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, students assigned to the role of guards showed sadistic tendencies within two days. These experiments were repeated in different countries and proved irrefutably the universality of the results. “I am sure that if the participants in the experiment were explained its essence, showed the results, and then asked to repeat everything from the beginning, then the percentage of those who were ready to fulfill the order would be significantly lower,” says Aleksey Goryainov. submission to him should, in our opinion, become the main mission of the museum and memorial complex."
The realization that inside the museum the visitor will face a terrible reality comes already at the entrance, located near the main gate of the camp. The entrance to the museum is a gray concrete tunnel gradually sinking into the ground. There is no natural light in the long narrow gallery that converges at the end to a small point. The total length of the oppressive corridor, immersed in twilight, is about 400 meters, but the visitor is not offered another road and everyone who entered must follow this route. Architects understand it as a kind of purgatory, from which no one will come out the same. Meanwhile, in addition to the oppressive atmosphere inside, there are no terrible testimonies about the victims of Auschwitz, no details that can alienate and frighten a person, cause disgust and kill the desire to comprehend what happened.
The underground corridor is the "executioner's path", a depiction of the life of ordinary people. The surviving documents and photographs make it possible to build such an exposition from beginning to end: here a person lives in a beautiful house, listens to music, plants flowers, gets an education, brings up children, and achieves first successes. At some point, evidence appears about his entry into the party, a new appointment, and a transfer. Gradually, this person becomes part of one mechanism crushing everything in its path. Further - the war, Auschwitz and the endless conveyor of corpses. Thus, before the eyes of the visitor, the entire life of the executioners is built, including those moments when they could stop, but for some reason did not.
The exhibition is interrupted by installations with the results of the psychological experiments described above, reminding people of the danger of becoming involved in evil. The visitor himself is involved in the process, participating in a series of simple tests compiled by professional psychologists, which clearly show how easy it is to manipulate people, leading them astray.
After going all the way, the visitor finds himself in a large mirrored hall, in the center of which is a six-meter glass cube filled to the brim with mobile phones. According to the authors, there should be one and a half million phones, which corresponds to the approximate number of those killed in the camp (the exact numbers are still unknown). The authors deliberately use a contemporary object as opposed to the real things that were taken from prisoners (glasses, toothbrushes, shaving brushes) presented in the existing Auschwitz museum. A mobile phone, which almost every person has today, becomes a binding to the present day, as if it says that even today the population of the planet is not immune from a repetition of the tragedy. A huge number of flickering screens are designed to give an idea of the scale of what happened, multiplying in countless mirror reflections. The cube is a monument to the victims of Auschwitz, and its reflections are the memory of all cases of genocide.
Around the hall of mirrors, there is a ramp leading up to the surface of the earth, where under a glass dome there is a "Gallery of Memory" - the memory of the victims of the camp. The main "exhibit" of the gallery is the camp itself, an eerie panorama of which opens up before the eyes of visitors in all its volume: towers, fences, the first line of barracks where hundreds of thousands of people were kept, stains of foundations and a forest of chimneys rising into the sky. It is here that the awareness of the reality of the tragedy that was told in the dungeon, physical contact with it, appears. The glass wall of the gallery opposite from the camp bears the surviving lists and photographs of prisoners. Most of the killed were not even recorded, they were sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz. The authors of the project decided to capture their memory in endless rows of small, three-centimeter human silhouettes. This is another attempt to give an idea to modern man about the monstrous events that took place in this place. Leaving the "Memory Gallery", the visitor again finds himself in front of the main gate of Auschwitz II, from where excursions around the territory of the original camp could begin.
A separate part of the exhibition is a room called the Black Hall, which is also located underground, just behind the mirror hall. It presents a traditional exposition of Holocaust museums depicting all the horrors of the camp. This room is deliberately placed in a separate block, as a necessary, but not mandatory part of the exposition. A person decides for himself whether it is worth visiting this hall and whether to take children there, whom what he sees can greatly shock. It is very important here to avoid the feeling of disgust at the depiction of emaciated prisoners, which prevents them from being treated as real people. Disgust is a biological defense reaction of a person, it blocks the center of empathy and all other feelings. All Nazi regimes used this technique, arousing disgust for this or that nation, ceasing to call a person a person and thereby justifying their crimes.
“We do not want the visitor to stop seeing people both in the executioners and in their victims. Both are people, - the authors of the project conclude. “We would like the museum to evoke the right experiences, so that by visiting it, a person gets his own experience, albeit very difficult, but really useful.”
The experience of designing such a museum, even without going beyond the field of conceptual reflections into the realm of real design, is certainly very important, as well as the experience of studying the limits of the malleability of human psychology, helplessness in front of propaganda, which easily discovers in almost any person a beast ready to look for enemies according to the named featured by someone. The topic is acutely painful, unpleasant, but relevant. At what point do we become involved in murder? When do we make the first concession to our conscience for the sake of career, success, prosperity? How surmountable are the problems of mass psychology, and, most importantly, is the "vaccination against evil" described by the authors of the project possible, is the disease of blind hatred cured? One must think that no one has answers to these questions. But attempts to cure it seem to be necessary.
