My mother lived for 42 years in a three-story house overlooking the site of the gas chambers and looting in Auschwitz, sometimes losing sleep thinking about what happened beyond her garden wall.
But the house in Oswiecim, in southern Poland, which was the home of the death camp’s military commander, Rudolf Höss, was “a good place to raise children,” Grazyna said. Jurczak, 62, a widow who raised two sons there.
The home, the subject of the Oscar-winning film “The Zone of Interest,” had “security, peace, a beautiful garden,” easy access to the river across the street and, in the winter, an ice rink. his two boys, he said.
Alone in the house after the death of her husband, she finally decided to leave. Another reason, he said, was that he had been disturbed by people who, after watching “Points of Interest,” were tramping through his garden, peering through the windows and reminding him of his home’s association with the Holocaust.
Last summer, Ms. Jurczak agreed to sell the home to the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based group that wants to open the house to visitors. He moved out in August, and in October the New York group completed the purchase of a nearby post-war house.
“I had to get out of there,” said Ms. Jurczak at her new home in a modern apartment complex in Oswiecim, a kilometer away from her former home. He declined to say how much the house sold for, but indicated it was above the property’s estimated $120,000 value.
Mark Wallace, a lawyer and former US diplomat who is the chief executive officer of the Counter Extremism Project, also declined to give an amount, saying only that his organization “wanted to do good” for Ms. Jurczak’s family but “didn’t want to pay.” a huge payment for the former Nazi territory, even if we didn’t know it.”
Now the house, at 88 Legionow Street, just outside the fence surrounding the camp, is being prepared to receive public visits for the first time, as part of the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Army’s liberation from Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a Polish institution in Oswiecim committed to remembering the victims of the Nazis, will host a host of world leaders on Jan. 27.
In this house, workers hired by the new owners removed 14 bins of rubbish and removed the wallpaper and other extras after the war. That left the place as it was when the Höss family lived there from 1941 until late 1944, including a Nazi-era lock on the bathroom door that read “frei/besetzt.,” German for free/living.
A mezuzah, a parchment containing Bible verses, was attached to the front door frame to honor Jewish tradition – and reject the fanaticism of its occupant, the commandant of Auschwitz. After the war, Commandant Höss recalled how the successful shooting of Russian prisoners in 1941 “put my mind at ease, because the mass extermination of the Jews was about to begin.”
He was hanged in 1947 from a stake placed between his former home and a Nazi crematorium.
On a table in the downstairs corner room that Commander Höss used as his home office are piles of torn and crumpled Nazi-era newspapers and other wartime artifacts that were found after the house was sold. There is also a coffee mug, marked SS, and bottles of German beer.
Striped pants once worn by an Auschwitz prisoner, taken from an upstairs room, where they were stuffed to block the hole. Researchers tried to determine who the wearers were by deciphering the faded prisoner number, written next to a small red triangle indicating that the wearer was a political prisoner and a faded yellow star designating a Jew.
“This house has been closed for 80 years. It was inaccessible to the dead and their families. Finally, we can open it to honor the survivors and show that this place of incredible evil is open to everyone,” said Mr Wallace.
The program, Mr. Wallace said, is to turn this house, and the adjacent building, into a research center on hatred, extremism and radicalization, Auschwitz, a new organization that will work to increase the pledge of “Never Again” from the memory of history. in the present tense.
Piotr Cywinski, a Polish historian and director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum since 2006, said that his state-run institution wanted to preserve its main goal of remembrance but saw the importance of supporting a project focused on the present and the future, as well as the past. .
“Fighting today’s reality is easier for an NGO than for a government institution,” he said, lamenting the rise of populism across Europe, which he called “a cancer of democracy.”
The new center will cover the entire site of Commandant Höss’s battlefield, including the long-closed garden where he met Hitler’s security chief, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Mengele, the doctor of the “angel of death” and other Nazi elites tasked with exterminating the Jews. Daniel Libeskind, an American architect, was commissioned to redesign the building.
Mr. Libeskind said he drew the first plans that aimed to transform the interior of the house into a “void, an abyss” – the outer walls are protected by a UNESCO conservation order – and the construction of a new building buried in the garden. facility with meeting rooms, library and data center.
More than two million people visit the former Auschwitz camp each year and, the architect said, they leave “horrified and stunned by death” but also need to “engage with anti-Semitism and other extremism in our political culture.”
Jacek Purski, the director of a Polish anti-extremism group, which is involved in the project, said he wants to use the house and the Nazi horrors as a weapon against what he sees as a resurgence of extremist views.
“A house is a house,” said Mr. Purski, looking out the second-story window of the former Höss home toward the chimney of the former Nazi crematorium. “But it’s in unpleasant, ordinary houses like this that fanatics happen today.”
Ms Jurczak, the former owner, said she has struggled to reconcile the happy, familiar memories of the house with its gruesome past.
Remembering the time of his family when he stopped himself: “I worry that I sound like Ms. Höss,” he said, referring to the commander’s wife, Hedwig Höss. In this film, Mrs. Höss refers to his home in Poland as “paradise” and is shown trying on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner sent to be executed by her husband.
The army commander’s wife, Mrs. Jurczak decided after watching the film, “you were probably worse than her husband,” because of her indifference to human suffering.
While awaiting execution in a Polish prison after the war, Mr. Höss, a former army commander, wrote a biography of Primo Levi, an Italian writer and survivor of Auschwitz, which he described as the work of a “sad officer” who “slowly changed on entering Auschwitz.” one of the greatest criminals in history.”
The house where Mr. The Höss residence was built between the two great wars of the last century by a Polish army officer who served in a nearby army camp, which was taken over by the Nazis after their invasion of Poland in 1939 and turned into an extermination factory. At least 1.1 million men, women and children were killed there, mostly in the gas chambers.
Taken over by the SS as the home of the commandant of Auschwitz, who changed the street number to 88, Heil Hitler’s numerical code, the house was returned to its original owner after the war and later sold to Mr. Jurczak, which was in charge until last year.
Mr. Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau museum, said he is eager to work with the Counter Extremism Project, in its efforts to fight extremism.
Extremism, he said, “unfortunately is not a mental illness; it’s a method” that uses widespread feelings of frustration.
Ordinary people with ordinary desires, he added, can turn into monsters.
Mr. Höss, he said, “was a wonderful father to his children and, at the same time, the main instigator of the most brutal murder in the history of the world.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.
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