Ideas - The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

In 2015, the poet-musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski made a strange discovery at the site of the former Stutthof concentration camp in Poland — something he calls 'a carpet of abandoned shoes.' But these were more than shoes: they're both artifacts and symbols of the Holocaust — as well as a flashpoint of nationalist denialism and historical amnesia. *This episode originally aired on May 2, 2019.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad. This episode originally aired in May 2019, and continues to be as relevant as ever. It's about how history gets forgotten, dismissed, or suppressed, especially with the continuing rise of authoritarianism virtually everywhere. Malgozata Zherve is a visual artist and radio journalist in Gdansk, Poland.

David Zane-Majrowicz is a radio producer who spends much of the year in that city. They were invited to join the poet-musician Josh Kwiatowski at the former Stutthof concentration camp to witness a strange discovery he made there in 2015, a pile of abandoned shoes. But that seemingly innocent pile contains the story of the Holocaust and a willful collective amnesia about the brutal realities of Nazi death camps set up in Poland after it was defeated by Germany 85 years ago this month. Their documentary is called The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp. Wasteland, wasteland in my arms Wasteland, wasteland in my heart Wasteland, wasteland all I see Wasteland, wasteland all I see

This story takes place in a wild pine forest in the dark, foreboding Polish winter. It might be the stuff of fairy tales, objects strewn helter-skelter in the desolate wood, a mysterious trail to be followed, if it didn't happen to take place in a Nazi extermination camp. An early March morning in the north of Poland, near the port city of Gdansk, in German Danzig,

Malgozata and I walk by the Stutthof-Museum-Gate, über die überraschenden Augen des Gästen und penetrieren in eine dünne Waldlande. Frische Tractor-Tracks führen zu zwei neuerlich verblasenen Mäuse von Erde und Schwäbchen. Das KZ-Lager Stutthof bestand vom 2. September 1939 bis zum 9. Mai 1945. Im Lager wurden 110.000 Menschen inhaftiert. Sie stammten aus 25 Ländern und vertraten 27 Nationalitäten. In Stutthof kamen 65.000 Menschen ums Leben. Die Kampfform ist bekannt für die Verleihung von Slavenarbeit an die Nazi-Kampfmaschine und war auch der Laboratorium für die Erzeugung von Soap aus dem Fett von Tausenden von Gefahren. Das Stutthof-Museum, das 1968 auf dem Ort gegründet wurde, nimmt nur eine Fünftel der ehemaligen Kampfform ab. only about one fifth of the former campground. The rest is overgrown by the sprawling pine forest

in which we've come to meet Grzegorz Kwiatkowski. Wasteland, wasteland in my mind Wasteland, wasteland in my mouth Wasteland, wasteland, all I see Wasteland, wasteland, all I see My name is Grzegorz Ketkowski. I am a... Hmm, who am I? All right. I'm a poet and musician. I live in Gdańsk.

We are in Stutthof, near Stutthof Museum of Stutthof Concentration Camp. And I'm here for many years because my grandfather was a prisoner of Stutthof Concentration Camp. Zhegorz is a member of what he calls the psychedelic band Troupa Troupa, which presents songs often dealing with death. band, Trupa Trupa, which presents songs often dealing with death. Kwiatkowski's gloomy poetry, filled with cemeteries and concentration camps, is also published in several countries. Radości. Joy.

Wiosną wędrowaliśmy z bratem po lasach, żeby pozbierać i zakopać zdechłe sarny, które nie przeżyły zimy, albo wpadły w sidła i wykrwawiły się. In springtime my brother and I wandered through the forests gathering and burying dead deer which hadn't survived the winter or fallen into traps and bled to death.

To były nasze najpiękniejsze lata. Taczka pełna sosnowych gałązek i smugi krwi i uczucia radości po dobrze wykonanej robocie. Those were our loveliest years. A blood-smeared wheelbarrow full of pine branches and the feeling of joy after well-done work. The meter-high mounds of earth made by recent excavation in the Stutthof forest yield grey earth mixed with rotting twigs and stones

and strange objects sitting in the upturned piles. Zegos and his friend came here to film the site in 2015 and on this very spot discovered... We went to the forest and suddenly in this forest we found out that there are a lot, a lot of shoes. Shoes. Not a lot like hundreds, but a lot like thousands of hundreds. Hundreds of thousands. And they're still here, lying around in the spring of 2018, jutting out of the soil. Not entire shoes, mostly rotten strips of leather which once adorned human feet.

And we started to dig in the ground and there were more and more and more shoes in the ground. Children's shoes, women's shoes. Wasteland, wasteland in my mouth Wasteland, wasteland all I see Wasteland, wasteland all I see My name is Piotr Hustielski. I work in the scientific department in the Stutthof Memorial. Piotr Hustielelski. I work in the scientific department in the memorial of Stutthof. Piotr Hruscielski works in the research department of the museum. Stutthof had its origins in the tense situation in the Hanseatic city of Danzig.

That is, in the difficult relations between Germans and Poles in the city. The first Stutthof prisoners were those who represented Polish interest in Danzig, intellectuals, teachers, doctors, functionaries. Those suspected of opposing German occupation of the local area called Pomerania. Now we're standing in the forest near the fence of the museum, of a concentration camp near the Jewish part of the museum, and these are kind of hills of shoes, little mountains of shoes. With time, Grzegorz would discover thousands more.

Scattered across hundreds of square meters of forest, and sometimes to a depth of one foot, the remnants include belts and pieces of striped uniforms once worn by the victims of the camp. He describes his find as a carpet of shoes. We're poking the ground with our fingers and our feet, and suddenly I come across a small yellow and brown object They're still here. From its size, the shoe must have belonged to someone no more than four or five years old. In 1941, Stutthof was turned into a forced labour camp, and the prison population swelled to include so-called antisocial elements,

among them Germans, Poles and foreigners. The museum guardian arrives on his sedgeway. He stops some 50 metres from us and stares pointedly. He didn't ask anything, so I guess guardian of a museum. And look, what are we doing? What's his problem? Are we trespassing? Do we look suspicious? The sight of our microphone interview seems to stop him from chasing us away. Yeah, so why not?

Silently, he turns and rolls back towards the museum. Wasteland, wasteland in my arms Wasteland, wasteland in my heart Wasteland, wasteland in my heart Wasteland, wasteland all I see Wasteland, wasteland all I see

In 1942, Stutthof was declared a concentration camp and many prisoners were sent there from other camps. To this were added professional criminals, the political opposition in Danzig, social democrats, communists, homosexuals, alcoholics, prostitutes, tramps, anyone on the margins of society. the margins of society. On 9 May, Soviet soldiers were moved to Stutthof. Later, inside the museum, we watch Soldaten in Stutthof, freien die wenigen hundert Fremde, die noch verletzt waren.

Die Russen formten eine Kommission, um Dokumente und Testimone von den Inhabern über Nazi-Kriege zu sammeln. Der dabei aufgezeichnete Film zeigt Stutthof unmittelbar nach der Befreiung. Etwas anderes, was die Russen sammeln, waren Schuhe. Hier ist ein Schuss auf eine Schuh-Mountain. Stutthof unmittelbar nach der Befreiung. Here's a close-up, a Russian soldier holding a pair of children's shoes for the camera. This is Marcin Tymiński speaking to us, the press attaché of the local conservation administration. In 1946, after the camp was liberated, the prisoners' barracks were bulldozed. Only the gas chamber and crematorium were kept intact. Any objects found in the barracks at that time were not considered to have historical value. The Polish state had other things to worry about.

Locals were allowed to come and take any metal pieces they could find. State-run firms came and tossed everything else into the forest swamp. The new situation is that we are in forest and there are a lot of trees here... and the bushes, and now they are gone. Grzegorz has been here many times since 2015. Today he notices something new. Trees have been cut down to make way for tractors to work the small 200 square meter area we're standing in. So I guess a few days ago these shoes were dig from the ground and some

big machinery came here and so I guess it's obvious that when you announced that you will be here, they started to do something with that. We called the museum for an appointment. They knew that we, journalists, were coming, so they had to act quickly to show some kind of progress on the site.

We're sitting with Stutthof Museum director Piotr Tarnowski. We're interested in the grounds behind the building. What might one expect to find there? Everything left over from the camp. Hidden German weapons, for example. After that, nature takes over. Nature takes over. People leave traces of history here and there, and nature overgrows them. OK, but this morning we came across tracks of heavy machinery in the forest. Were the machines just giving nature a hand?

The museum director claims that these tracks are from last autumn, which would directly contradict Grzegorz and the evidence of our own eyes that they were made in the last few days for our benefit. eyes that they were made in the last few days for our benefit. The tractor marks are not always visible because the earth is soft, he says. In a few months, nobody will even see the shoes anymore because nature will just do her thing. This is the story of the journey which my father and I took when we went to Danzig and to Stutthof. We went to look for my mother's grave, to look for the satellite city of their metropolis of death. And we reached it.

We read a book by Jewish historian Otakulka and his mother was killed near that place. She was a Jewish prisoner of a Stutthof concentration camp. The book they read is a classic of Holocaust literature called Landscapes in the Metropolis of Death, Reflections on Memory and Imagination, by the Czech-Israeli historian Otto Dov Kulka, himself a former child inmate at Auschwitz. The camp itself, Stutthof itself, was a kind of field,

a seemingly almost endless space, desolate yet somehow cultivated, the grass cut, a sort of lawn stretching not endlessly but up to the edge of a huge black forest, behind which, as we were told, was the sea. Here, in this forest, as had been explained to us, had stood the camp of the Jewish women sent from Auschwitz. Here, too, had been the large pit in which the bodies were burned. I walked. I did not really know where I was going or what I wanted. I walked through the large space of the lawn, with no fences, no barbed wire, no high grass, no trees.

I proceeded from one sort of monument to another, from one camp to the next, moving toward the forest, where no structure stood and no stone lay. It was a place of primeval bleakness, marshes, fallen trees, white birches, dark trees, and trees I did not bother to identify. I came closer and, after a moment's hesitation, I entered the forest. Returning, my eyes were fixed on the ground. And, as I scoured the grass like this, aimlessly, almost every few steps I encountered strips of leather. Dark, some rotted, dried out.

I picked up one or two of them without knowing what I was doing. They were the only distinctive thing in that grass. The director of the Stutthof Museum asked me, as a notable historian, to meet with the research staff and to partake of tea and cookies. We were also given a photocopy from the card indexed of the female inmates, my mother's card, with her details. Cause of death? Blank. Date of death? Blank.

Former place of stay? Auschwitz. But the main reason I'm describing this encounter is an event that came later, when we went to see the small exhibition displayed in the building. One of the items in it was a large long glass case containing thousands of shoes, all in a jumble as they had been stuffed into the case. We asked them,

What? Here too? The women went to their death with their shoes taken from them beforehand. For in Auschwitz those shoes belonged to hundreds of thousands of people who no longer needed them after taking them off in the corridors of the gas chambers. The director of the site said, No, these shoes are from Auschwitz.

But their origin from Auschwitz, their description only from Auschwitz, is false. The current museum director doesn't believe what his predecessor told Professor Kulka in 1992, that many of the shoes belonged to Auschwitz prisoners and were later sent to Stutthof to be reworked. For him, most were sent directly from the German Reich. What difference does it make? If the shoes were from Auschwitz,

it would reinforce the industrial nature of the concentration camp complex. All of the camps had interlocking functions. This is why Otto Kulka refers to Stutthof as a satellite of Auschwitz. Yes, a portion of these shoes were reworked here and turned, for example, into backpacks for German soldiers. Some of the shoes were given to German families living in the area, and others sent directly to Germany. So, Stutthof inmates, whose own shoes had been taken from them, were made to strip the leather from and rework the shoes already taken from Auschwitz prisoners. Added to this is one often overlooked aspect of the Nazi Holocaust, organized plundering.

Here was yet another gruesome reason for giving the shoes sent from Auschwitz a very close look, what they might contain in their confines. Indeed, just as Auschwitz sent the armies of slaves, the women, trainloads of slaves with shaved heads. It also sent freight cars of shoes. And the inmates of Stutthof were engaged in fixing and repairing and examining the shoes,

in case hidden in them were the last treasures of those who perished. This is the area where we found the shoes. The standoff between Kwiatkowski and the museum director continued from the moment Grzegorz came upon the shoe fragments in the forest in 2015. As you can see, a few years later, nothing happened. Is this just bureaucratic ineptitude?

Or is there something behind the refusal to deal with the shoes? We're giving the director the benefit of the doubt. In a roundabout fashion, without mentioning Kwiatkowski, we ask him how he first found out about the shoes in the forest. Where did you find out? A random finder. Ask him how he first found out about the shoes in the forest. From two men who stumbled upon them accidentally while walking in the forest, I instructed them to declare their fine to the community administration. And when they neglected to do this, the museum took up the task,

even though the museum is not responsible for them. Of course he's lying and you weren't just tourists by an accident. My grandfather was a prisoner of this concentration camp so it's a big history and we had an appointment in the museum that day. It's one big ridiculous thing in a very communistic style that you try to do something but nothing is happening really. Piatkowski is referring here to the old communist regime in Poland. Bureaucrats make promises, then nothing happens.

Society stagnates. There are still remnants of this in Poland even today. And let's not forget, these shoes have been lying here long enough to cover the Soviet era as well. These shoes have been lying here long enough to cover the Soviet era as well. We're scratching our heads, trying to determine how this was possible. Unbelievable I don't believe them Unbelievable Six months after the meeting with the boss of the museum,

they didn't do anything because I checked it. So I called journalists, and they came to this forest with the cameras, and it was a very big case in the media, also in the world media, in Daily Telegraph, USA Today, etc. From the London Daily Telegraph, October 2015. Recently a party of hikers exploring the surroundings stumbled upon a massive dump of objects dating from the war, but hidden in the woods ever since.

The gruesome find included great numbers of shoes, prison uniforms, belts and other items of clothing scattered over an area of hundreds of square feet. The camp covers quite a large area, which includes open space and woodland, which may explain how these objects could have escaped notice until now. Of course, these objects did not entirely escape notice. It may be more a question of the authorities wanting to escape noticing them. Aside from the foreign media, Polish TV cameras begin filming the carpet of shoes spread over the forest floor. Scraps of leather everywhere, scraps of leather, as if a gigantic shoe factory had exploded here before a gathered group of journalists museum director Tarnowski claims that a provisional analysis shows that the thousands of discarded shoe soles did not in fact belong to Stutthof prisoners.

The proof is that, according to Stanowski, on certain spots beer bottles were found among the debris, and concentration camp victims surely did not have access to beer. The debate about these shoes started in Poland, mainly in Gdańsk. So some of the authorities said it's just a trash, so we shouldn't do anything. To, co zostało znalezione, ta sterta butów, to właściwie nie były buty, tylko to były już ich destrukty. The director is very clear about the nature of the fragments.

The original shoes, in his opinion, sent from the German Reich to be reworked by Stutthof prisoners, were then ripped apart. What counted was the upper leather, which could be turned, for example, into holsters for the SS, which would explain why today

one can find mostly shoe soles lying in the forest. The remaining soles were ditched because they were trash, simply worthless. The prisoners of a local prison came here and they were collecting these shoes as a way of voluntary work. Of course it was nice, but the archaeologists should do it. It's not kind of trash, a day of ecology and clean forests. In 2016, Kwiatkowski again writes to the museum director, this time obtaining a promise that the area would be examined by archaeologists, although he's told that the process could take years.

And again, why so much bother only for trash? Speaking to us, the museum director now changes tack. He claims to be grateful for the discovery. It meant that the entire site could be examined by experts. A first superficial excavation by a team of archaeologists had turned up hundreds of artifacts, soldiers' name tags, pieces of porcelain, etc. But still, nobody bothered about the shoes.

With time, director Tarnowski even becomes proud of the situation. These artifacts of suffering at least won't fall into the wrong hands. these artifacts of suffering at least won't fall into the wrong hands. If only I had known about them earlier, I would never have ignored them. Unbelievable. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

You can also find Ideas on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in.

Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Holocaust denial has been with us since the Holocaust itself. And with the rise of authoritarianism around the world, it's increasing. But equally disturbing, maybe even more disturbing, are studies showing that ignorance of the Holocaust has grown alarmingly high, even with all the books, movies, and works of art about it or inspired by it. Willful amnesia is what this episode is about. It's called The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp by radio producers Malgozata Gervais and David Zane Meyerowitz.

producers Malgozata Zervé and David Zane Meyerowitz. The story takes place in Poland, in and around the former concentration camp of Stutthof. God, unbelievable The sounds which I could pray to Oh my Lord, unbelievable When we drove up to Stutthof in March 2018, we noticed a small but telling change. The wording on the sign at the gate announcing the camp had been altered from former Nazi concentration camp to former German concentration camp.

Poland has long wrangled, and rightly so, at hearing the expression Polish death camps, when they were in fact built and run by Germans on Polish soil. Mrs. Driva, head of the Stutthof Museum Archives, where she's been working for decades. She's showing us fragile historical documents and, amazingly, even allowing us to handle and photograph them. Here, for example, is shipment number 109, arriving on the 14th of September 1944

from the administration KL Auschwitz to Stutthof, listing prisoners' clothing, 3,800 summer coats, 3,000 overalls, 5,000 pieces of underwear, etc. Here's something. 5th of October 1944. From the Eberswald National Railway Repair Workshop to Stutthof. Footwear for KZ prisoners.

100 pairs of wooden clogs. So the Nazis handed out clogs to the inmates while taking their leather shoes and sending them to German citizens in the Reich. Here's another list from the famous now Canadian multinational shoe company Bata. At the time, run by a citizen of Czechoslovakia, 25,000 pairs of wooden shoes, sent on the 10th of November 1944. Customer, the procurement office of the Waffen-SS Dachau.

the procurement office of the Waffen-SS Dachau. After the war, Mr. Bata would strongly deny ever collaborating with the Nazis, and I'm holding his business list to the SS in my hands. My name is Waldemar Szymański. I'm a representative of the Schutthof Museum. We're in the barrack of the canteen. Now we're standing on the ground floor of the museum with Mr. Szymański, the press officer. In front of us is a huge glass case containing thousands of shoes, including some of those collected by the Red Army.

It's the same display mentioned by Otto Kulka during his 1992 visit. These shoes were brought here mainly from the outside, from the civil German market, but also from other concentration camps. Malgozata asks him how these shoes are distinguished from those we saw lying about the forest this morning. The only difference is that some shoes were cleaned and then protected under glass, while others were allowed to decay. This glass case was originally open, but in the end closed off because museum visitors simply jumped over the barriers and helped themselves to souvenirs. Wasteland, wasteland in my arms

Wasteland, wasteland in my heart Wasteland, wasteland all I see Wasteland, wasteland, all I see. But anyway, this territory, it's not secured. You can see that the shoes are everywhere, and it really looks like a trash. I think it's not the best way of remembering people killed in the Holocaust. Back in the woods on this cold spring morning in 2018, Grzegorz is moving up and down between the upturned mounds, taking photos, sticking his hand into the earth

and shaking his head in frustration. For three years now, he's been trying to get the museum to at least fence in the historical artefacts. The director has an interesting counter-argument to this. As long as people don't know these shoes are in the forest, they don't take them. If you put a fence there, people will think there's something valuable and they jump over and start digging. And then they sell what they find on eBay as original Stutthof concentration camp artefacts.

And that's why the director doesn't like talking to journalists like us. They print something, and the next day, the area is overrun by historical fortune hunters. But why has it taken so long for the real archaeologist to start digging, we ask him. The story isn't all black and white. The land belongs to the National Forestry Authority, but is administered by the Sztutowo community. And it's the curator of the provincial administration, Agnieszka Kowalska, who decides what happens with the ground. Some of the land of the former camp is Sztutowo's land. who decides what happens with the ground.

As long as the land is not fundamentally changed, we can't force the local community to initiate excavation. Malgozata asks her, what about the local community authority. The local community authority isn't in any case interested in this story. There was even a project to build a Catholic cemetery on the site of the concentration camp. So we decide to talk to the head of the archaeological team, Signum, who worked over the site. Aleksander Kvapinski excavated the area up to December 2017. We came with metal detectors.

We temporarily closed off the area because we found landmines from the Second World War and had to call in the bomb squad. As for the shoes, we gathered what we could. When Malgorzata tells him there are still shoes there lying unprotected today, he says he'll go and have a look. In order to make sure that no one trips over them,

you must remember that after the war, they were simply dumped on the ground in the forest, not even buried, after which trees were planted on top of them. How is it possible that they lay there for seven decades without anyone seeing them? I don't know. Maybe one has to go deeper into the forest.

And what does he think ought to be done about it? Something like a burial. The remains of these shoes have emotional value, not just historical. They should definitely not remain in the woods. Wasteland, wasteland in my arms not remain in the woods. So, after all these years, something like a burial is finally what the Stutthof Museum plans to do with the wayward Jews. First of all, they need to be dried in the sun

and completely cleaned of all dirt and organic material, and then they will be buried in an already existing monument on the site. Yes, a huge open-air sculpture from 1968, the Monument of Struggle and Martyrdom, under whose obelisk the ashes of the cremated Stutthof inmates are already buried. Now they'll have their old shoes for company. This heavy, heroic Soviet-era monolith,

Director Tarnowski beams, will at least get a bit of soul now. The idea of making something with that is great, but I think it should be visible, not invisible. It's almost the same that they would be in the forest on the ground. To make them disappear under the monument is not a reverential, soulful act. It's an ironic, bureaucratic solution

for them to be stuck away where no one will ever have to look at them again. In the end, they might just as well be trash, discarded, recycled into dust, next to the ashes of 65,000 murdered inmates. So it's totally a lack of respect to the prisoners of Stutthof, to my grandfather as a prisoner of Stutthof, to me as a person who tried to do something. Visible and invisible are really the key words in this entire primeval forest fairy tale. Because, to believe the local administrators,

no one seems to have ever seen these shoe fragments before Kwiatkowski supposedly discovered them in 2015. Not the director, whose museum sits about 300 meters Tak jak wyjaśnialiśmy to jeszcze w 2015 roku, nie. To tyle to z mediów. nor the leader of the archaeological team. No, I neither saw nor heard about the shoes until they were reported in the media. Nor Piotr from the research department of the museum, who grew up in the immediate surroundings.

Didn't he notice the shoes when he went to play in the woods as a child? No, I saw neither shoes nor other artifacts. I only saw the shoes which are in the glass case on display in the museum. But nobody in my village ever mentioned other objects lying in the forest. Even the archivist, Mrs. Driva, told the London Daily Telegraph, quote, I've worked here for 30 years and none of my colleagues ever spoke about artifacts lying in the forest around the museum. I don't believe in Unbelievable They are lying because they knew about these shoes

and everyone knew about these shoes from Stutthof city and everyone knew that in this forest there are many, many shoes because they were lying not only there but they were in many, many places because, you know, animals were digging in the ground. So it was one big trash in this forest. This fairy tale is slowly becoming reality. In the primeval forest lie secrets which mustn't be talked about.

People pass by these secrets, see them out of the corner of their eyes, day in and day out on their daily walks. Fortune hunters have dug up the ground here, looking for concentration camp treasures. Today in Stutthof we notice that animals, probably wild boars, have been here foraging for food on the site. And they've dug up more of those bothersome shoe fragments, so they're visible again. Although we're not meant to notice them.

Yes, the director is right. Nature is doing her thing. The Stutthof Forest was an integral part of the sinister business carried out here. Here stood the forced labor workshops, scattered around the gas chambers and the crematorium, where shoe leather was transformed into military gear. Perhaps it was too much effort to destroy the waste remnants, so they were just tossed out the window into the woods. It's possible the bureaucrats see only what they need to see. Many of them may have no real interest in history, no basic empathy.

But the historians and experts in the area also failed to see the shoes. They needed to be discovered by a young poet-musician. We never, we never forget musiały być odkryte przez młodego muzyczka. Dekret. Dekry. Prezydent państwa S. po namowach tysięcy obywateli wydał dekret unieważniający śmierć. Uwagał tysiąców mieszkańców, prezydent kraju S.

dekrydował, że śmierć została teraz zakończona. Z dnia na dzień cmentarze zmieniono w zieleniące się parki, zaś hospicja i szpitale w przedszkola. Stojąc na rynku jednego z miast państwa S, przeglądamy się twarzą mieszkańców. W marketplace, w pewnym miasteczku w kraju S, obserwujemy twarze mieszkańców. Nie widać na nich strachu, ani śladów po nieprzespanej nocy. Nie widać żadnych śladów strachu, ani śladów nieprzespanej nocy.

Na pobliskim murze ktoś napisał niegroźne zachody słońca and someone has written on a nearby wall sunsets are not dangerous It's always a problem of writing about genocide and Holocaust and paradoxical stuff because you're really near the edge and you're really very close to the perpetrators. So it's on one hand fascinating, on the other hand you have to really watch out of darkness. So I'm so angry about the war and I'm starting to be the bad guy. This decree poem is on one hand very clear, nice and clean, like a Walt Disney story, but on the other hand there is something under it, there is some will to the end, to the end of all of human beings.

Kwiatkowski's bittersweet take on his own country's history comes at a moment when history itself is getting a Polish remake. In January of 2018, the Polish parliament passed a new law, making it illegal to accuse the Polish authorities or Polish citizens of complicity in the Holocaust. It has come to the point where the deputy culture minister has called for a Holocaust Museum to commemorate Poles killed by the Nazis during World War II. For a Holocaust Memorial Day in January this year, demonstrators marched outside the Auschwitz

camp with signs reading, Auschwitz camp with signs reading Auschwitz made in Germany. Underneath is a Nazi flag and a German flag with an equal sign between them. Back in the forest, we're following up on Zegosz's motivations behind his three-year-long campaign on behalf of the shoes. Is it an obsession? Yeah, I don't know if it's obsession. It's complicated. It's connected to my family. On the other hand, I'm a citizen of Gdańsk, so the Second World War started in Gdańsk

and the ruins are still in the city centre even. So I am the child of the people who were victims of the war, and their kids were also victims, so I think I'm the last generation. I feel the impact of this stuff on my life, and I've got this kind of character that wants to make something from A to Z. If I think something is making in a wrong way, I'm fighting with it, fighting, fighting for years, and I'm stopping to fight when it's solved.

Dear Mr. Majrujc, I thank you for the invitation to participate in a conversation for your radio documentary program. To my regret, I have to decline the invitation for health problems. We had hoped to have Professor Kulka from Tel Aviv speak directly here about the Stutthof shoes and his 1992 trip. and his 1992 trip. In his letter to us, he underlines a point he would have made verbally, directly quoting our invitation letter to him.

In your letter you write, for us, the shoes lying untouched is a metaphor for the way in which a country like Poland, there are others of course, deals with its own history. This meaning concerns primarily the aspect you don't mention at all. Namely, that the shoes that were sent to Stutthof from Auschwitz

belong to the thousands of murdered Jews in the gas chambers within the Nazi so-called final solution of the Jewish question. The camp of the Jewish women was in the place on which today there is only a wild forest with marshes and fallen trees and no sign of commemoration whatsoever. The mounting dead Jewish women at that place were burned there in large pits, covered today as well by the wild growing forest. This, to my mind, has to be clearly said in the radio documentary program you are asking me to take part in. Sincerely yours, Otto Dov Kulka. We never, we never forget. We never, we never forget.

We never, we never forget. These shoes show how much suffering and suffering was inflicted on this place, on innocent people. These shoes show how much pain and suffering was caused on this site. On entering the camp, prisoners were made to hand over all their possessions, clothes, shoes, razors, toothbrushes. And this theft was the first step in dehumanizing them. The shoes help us keep their memory alive. For me, it's kind of never forget. We can't forget about it for the future generations.

We should say about it as much as we can that it was a fact and that it happened. Many people want to change history and I think this kind of issues, this is the old truth. So we have to secure these artefacts from the Holocaust because it will be not so easy to say it didn't happen. It's kind of an anti-war statement, you know, but also kind of a never forget statement. We never, we never forget. We never, we never forget.

We never, we never forget. From this industry, which afterwards sent the shoes to all parts of the Reich, there remained the strips of leather that were strewn across the whole vast area of the camps, which, as I noted, were cultivated so impressively in the form of a huge lawn and rectangular monuments made of white stone. and rectangular monuments made of white stone. Here, then, was another surprising connection between the Auschwitz metropolis and its satellite city of Stutthof.

Not only were people caught up in the immutable law, notwithstanding that they had left that place, but the shoes of the murdered, of those who perished, accompanied them here. You were listening to Ideas and to a documentary called The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp. called The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp. It was produced by Malgojata Jervé and David Zane Meyerowitz.

The speakers were Sean Lawton, Dara Jemaniak and David Zane Meyerowitz. Sound mix by Mikhail Kuba and Yaroslav Zorin. Music by Trupa Trupa. For more information on this story, just go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, where you can always get our podcast. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. We never, we never forget. We never, we never forget. We never, we never forget. We never, we never forget We never, we never forget We never, we never forget Humiliation We never, we never forget Those grand old times

We never, we never forget Humiliation Never, never forget. Humiliate.