For 42 years, her mother lived in a three-story house overlooking the former gas chambers and gallows at Auschwitz, and sometimes had trouble sleeping because she thought about what happened on the other side of the garden wall.
But the house in Oświęcim in southern Poland, once the home of Rudolf Hess, the wartime head of an extermination camp, “was the perfect place to raise our children,” Grazyna said. Jurcak, 62, is a widow who raised two sons there.
The home, which was the subject of the Oscar-winning film “Zone of Interest,” has “safety, tranquility and beautiful gardens” and easy access to the river across the road and ice skating in the winter. There was a space where links could be placed. The two sons said:
After her husband died, she was left alone at home and finally decided to leave. One reason for this was that after watching “The Zone of Interest,” she felt uneasy about people walking around her garden and peering through her windows, reminding her of her home’s connection to the Holocaust. she said.
Last summer, Jurcak agreed to sell the house. counter-extremism project; A New York-based group wants to open their home to visitors. She moved in in August, and a New York group completed the acquisition of the house and an adjoining postwar home in October.
“I had to get out of there,” Yurcak said from his new home in a modern apartment complex in Oświęcim, a mile from his previous home. She did not say how much the house sold for, but suggested it was slightly more than the property’s estimated price of about $120,000.
Mark Wallace, a lawyer, former U.S. diplomat and chief executive of the Counter-Extremism Project, also said his organization “wanted to do the right thing” by Jurczyk’s family but “didn’t want to pay.” and refused to pay compensation. Even if it were possible, there would be a hefty premium on former Nazi property. ”
Today, the house at 88 Legionov Street, just outside the camp’s perimeter fence, is being prepared for public visits for the first time as part of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces.
of Auschwitz-Birkenau National MuseumA Polish facility in Oświęcim, dedicated to memorializing Nazi victims, is scheduled to host dozens of world leaders on January 27th.
At the house, workers hired by the new owners removed 14 trash cans and removed wallpaper and other postwar additions. As a result, it remains in much the same condition as when the Hess family lived there from 1941 to late 1944, with a Nazi-era lock on the bathroom door and a German word meaning free/occupied. It said “frei/besetzt.”
A mezuzah, a piece of parchment with a Bible verse written on it, is attached to the door frame to respect Jewish tradition and deny the fanaticism of the original occupant, the commander of Auschwitz. After the war, Commander Hess recalled that the successful experimental gassing of Russian prisoners in 1941 “reassured me that the mass extermination of the Jews would soon begin.”
He was hanged in 1947 on a gallows erected between his former home and a Nazi crematorium.
On a table in the downstairs corner room that Commander Hess used as his home office are piles of torn and crumpled Nazi-era newspapers and other wartime artifacts found after the house was sold. It has become. There are also coffee mugs and German beer bottles embossed with the SS seal.
A pair of striped trousers once worn by Auschwitz prisoners was recovered from the attic, where they had been stuffed to seal the hole. Researchers determined who wore it by deciphering a faded prisoner number written next to a small red triangle indicating the wearer was a political prisoner and a nearly faded yellow star indicating Jewish identity. I’m trying to find out who.
“This house has been closed for 80 years. It was out of reach for the victims and their families. We are finally paying our respects to the survivors and making this place of incredible evil accessible to all.” We can open it to show that we’re open to the public,” Wallace said.
Wallace said the plan is to transfer the house and adjacent grounds to the Auschwitz Center for Research on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, a new organization working to extend the “never again” pledge from historical memory. He said it was a matter of change. to the current action.
Piotr Cywiński, a Polish historian and director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum since 2006, says his state-run institution wants to maintain its core mission of commemoration, but not just the past but also the present. said he believes there is value in supporting projects focused on the future. .
“It is easier for NGOs to fight the realities of today than for state institutions,” he said, lamenting the rise of populism across Europe, which he called “a cancer on democracy.”
The new center will encompass the entirety of Commander Höss’ wartime holdings, including the area where Höss was responsible for Hitler’s security chief Heinrich Himmler, the “Angel of Death” doctor Josef Mengele, and other missions. It also includes a long cordoned-off garden area where he met with high-ranking Nazi officials. exterminate the Jews. American architect Daniel Libeskind was commissioned to redesign the facility.
Libeskind said he had drawn up preliminary plans that envisioned turning the interior of the house into a “void, an abyss.” The outer wall is protected by a wall. UNESCO Conservation Order — and the construction of a new partially buried building in the garden area with conference rooms, a library and a data center.
According to the architect, more than 2 million people visit the former Auschwitz concentration camp each year and return “fascinated by horror and death,” but also “engaged with contemporary anti-Semitism and other extremism in political culture.” ”There is also a need.
Jacek Prusski, head of a Polish anti-extremism group involved in the project, said he wanted to use the house and the horrors of the Nazi past as a weapon against what he sees as a resurgence of extremist ideology.
“A home is a home,” Pruschi said, looking out at the chimney of a former Nazi crematorium from the second-floor window of the former Hess mansion. “But it is in these boring, ordinary homes that extremism is happening today.”
Former owner Jurcak said he still struggles to reconcile happy, ordinary memories of the house with its tragic past.
As she recalled the time her family spent there, she suddenly stopped and said, “I’m worried that I sound like Mr. Hess,” referring to the commander’s wife, Hedwig Hess. Ta. In the film, Höss enthusiastically describes her home in Poland as a “paradise” and is seen trying on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner sent to the slaughterhouse by her husband.
After watching the movie, the commander’s wife, Yurchak, decided that “he might have been worse than her husband” because of his indifference to human suffering.
After the war, while awaiting execution in a Polish prison, former commander Hess wrote an autobiography that Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi described as the work of a “gradually evolved, monotonous bureaucrat.” I commented. One of the greatest criminals in history.”
The house where Mr. Hess lived was built during the two great wars of the last century by Polish military officers serving in an adjacent army garrison, and was taken over by the Nazis after the 1939 invasion of Poland. , turned into an extinction factory. At least 1.1 million men, women, and children were murdered there, most in gas chambers.
Requisitioned by the SS as the home of the Auschwitz commandant, who changed the address to Heil Hitler’s PIN number 88, the house was returned to its original owners after the war and later sold to Yurchak’s husband’s family. He owned it until last year.
Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum, said he is eager to cooperate with counter-extremism projects in efforts to combat extremism.
Extremism is “unfortunately not a mental illness; it is a way of exploiting widespread feelings of discontent.”
Ordinary people with ordinary ambitions can turn into monsters, he added.
Mr. Hess was “a wonderful father to his children, and at the same time was the main organizer of one of the most brutal murders in the history of the world,” he said.
Anatole Maggiarts I contributed a report from Warsaw.
