(UN)KNOWN NEIGHBORHOOD
Krzysztof Piętka’s work is closely connected to the place where he lives and creates his paintings, as well as to the history of his family and the immediate area. The artist’s studio is located in his family home in Babice, just a few minutes bicycle ride from the Death Gate and gas chambers of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The complicated neighborhood and history of the former camp area have been associated with the artist since his earliest years, although for a long time he was not fully aware of the place in which he was living.
”She saw smoke from the Birkenau crematoria”.
The history of Krzysztof Piętka’s family is closely linked to the Oświęcim area. Before the outbreak of World War II, his grandparents lived in small villages, Babice and Brzezinka, near the town that became a symbol of the Holocaust. In 1941, Krzysztof’s grandmother, Marta, was just 7 years old. Grandfather Emil was 25. Together with their families, they had to leave their own homes, as did thousands of people expelled from neighboring villages, as well as from Oświęcim. The family homes of Krzysztof’s grandparents were demolished after their expulsion, and the building materials from those homes were used to construct the Birkenau camp. All livestock, real estate, and farmland, in the meantime, were confiscated for the expansion of the camp.
“Grandma was relocated to Bieruń Nowy, about 2.5 kilometers from her house. In conversations with me, she recalled that as a little girl she saw plumes of smoke rising from the Birkenau crematoria. She remembered the suffocating stench of burning corpses that could be smelt many kilometers away from the camp. She also saw prisoners working in the surrounding farmlands, adjacent to her former house”, Krzysztof recalls the accounts of his grandmother.
Of the more than 500 houses, only a few have remained
After World War II, my grandparents returned to their home villages. However, Krzysztof never talked to his grandfather about this subject - he died in 2000, when the boy was only 10 years old.
“I can’t imagine what grandpa Emil felt when, returning to his home village of Brzezinka. Instead of his home, he saw a completely changed landscape of the village - a gigantic concentration camp. In the village, 524 houses were demolished to build Birkenau, and only six remained,” says Krzysztof.
His grandmother talked about her war memories reluctantly - these events were extremely traumatic for her. What was her post-war history? The girl returned to Babice with her parents and, like her future husband, she found emptiness in place of a home, which had been razed to the ground. However, the family lived in a building that also belonged to their family, but luckily it was not demolished. According to Krzysztof, all indications are that it was renovated during the war and inhabited by a German settler working at the IG Farben factory.
The stigma of living in the vicinity of the former camp
Next to the preserved house, by contrast, were farm fields where Auschwitz prisoners had worked.
“The first wheat my grandmother harvested when she returned home was grain that had been planted by Auschwitz prisoners working at the site”, - Krzysztof Piętka recounts. He adds that his grandparents started from scratch after the war with a sense of immense trauma, losing everything they had, in utter poverty. “Just like other people returning to the areas of the former camps - including the immense stigma of living in those areas”, - the artist says. Yet, they were starting their lives here completely anew.
Krzysztof’s grandparents did not want to talk to their children and grandchildren about painful memories. However, as is often the case, history reminded them of itself. As a child, Krzysztof’s mother, while playing in the home garden, found buried Nazi coins with swastikas visible on them.
A beautiful, yet dangerous place
Krzysztof Piętka was born in 1990, almost 50 years after the end of the war. He lived in a multi-generational home with his grandparents, parents and siblings. “I was greatly influenced in my perception of reality by the specific area where I lived as a child and continue to live today. It is a floodplain located on the edge of the village of Babice. On one side of the house is the Vistula River, and on the other is its old river bed. During floods, the area becomes an island. On the one hand, it’s a beautiful, but also dangerous piece of land”, the artist says.
Growing up in a kind of isolation sharpened Krzysztof’s ability to observe what was closest to him. The dangerous, swampy area around the house became the boundary of his awareness of space as a child. When he was 7 years old, however, a dream began to haunt him. In it, the boy would leave his home and walk out onto a nearby levee - he was very curious about what was at the end of it.
“In this dream, I decided to make my way along the embankment to see what was at the end of it. Moving away from the house, the landscape changed become increasingly ominous. The surrounding vegetation was getting ever drier. Walking onward, the land seemed scorched, lifeless. Finally, my journey came to an end - in front of me I saw a gigantic black space, which was spewing fire and burning everything around it. It was a terrifying sight”, Krzysztof recalling the dream. He wanted to escape in his dream, he says, but the black space pulled him into its depths every time. At that point, the boy always woke up.
A dozen years later, Krzysztof, already a grown man, checked on Google Maps where this levee actually ends. It turned out to be a forest near the so-called ‘Little White House’ - the second makeshift gas chamber at Birkenau, where thousands of people were murdered while the camp was in operation. The end of this embankment is also near Birkenau’s four largest gas chambers and crematoria (numbers II, III, IV, and V).
Preschool, school, and household chores
But it was not only the immediate surroundings of Krzysztof’s home that were linked to the history of the camp.
“When I was in preschool, I played with my friends using Nazi coins with swastikas that my mom found in the garden. Later, I learned that during the war, around 180 female prisoners from Auschwitz concentration camp were held in the preschool building. There were also SS offices there. This building was located in the area of the Auschwitz-Birkenau sub-camp known as Babitz”, recalls Krzysztof. He adds that the primary school he later attended is also located on the grounds of the former sub-camp (it was built after the war).
As a preschooler and schoolboy, however, Krzysztof did not know all this. And, there was more he did know about. Krzysztof’s family had farmland in the villages of Babice and Brzezinka. When he was a boy, he helped his parents with the harvest.
“Once we went to the field in Brzezinka, which is located about 200 meters from the Death Gate in Birkenau, and only about 15 meters from an SS watchtower and the barbed wire of the camp. That was the first time I saw the Birkenau camp up close”, he recounts. To a little boy, the buildings of the former camp resembled a castle.
“I didn’t have the impression that it was something ominous. It was just a part of the normal landscape for me. My parents later told me that many people had died in this place, but they didn’t want to burden my psyche and provide more detailed information about what happened here”.
The family’s other farm field, on the other hand, was located about 150 meters from the so-called ‘Little Red House,’ which was the first makeshift gas chamber created in a confiscated house, where thousands of people perished. This field was also about 20 meters from the fence of an unfinished section of BIII, known as ‘Mexico,’ which was a part of the Birkenau camp.
“Until today, a concrete pillar along with fragments of the fence and elements of barbed wire have been preserved there”, says Krzysztof. He adds that his family’s other farm field was located in the center of the village of Brzezinka, very close to the no longer existing hospital barracks for the SS personnel and near the SS barracks.
Family home in wartime photographs
Krzysztof Piętka loved history as an elementary and middle school student. He looked at maps, analyzing them. However, the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp was not particularly present in his consciousness.
“I didn’t understand the place I was living in. It wasn’t until I turned 20 in 2010 that I began regularly visiting the area of the former Birkenau. I explored the former camp area based on Allied photographs taken from an airplane in 1944. These images revealed the entire infrastructure of extermination, including my home. It was a tremendous shock for me. This marked the beginning of my comparison of those photos with local maps. Intuitively, I gradually started to familiarize myself with the former camp areas”, Krzysztof Piętka explains. This pursuit has been ongoing for several years, and during this time, his historical awareness of the place where he lived since birth has undergone significant changes.
A few years ago, after reading Marek Rawecki’s article “The Unwanted Auschwitz” as well as his book “Auschwitz-Birkenau Zone”, he has also stopped associating the camp area solely with the place where the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau was established after the war. “It is only 4% of the total area that encompassed the Auschwitz concentration camp. We know that this area is the most important—here are the barracks, ruins of crematoria, places of extermination. However, I was previously unaware of the existence of the so-called Interessengebiet des KL Auschwitz1, the Interest Zone of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp”, adds the artist.
The studio, which is located today on the grounds of Krzysztof Piętka’s house, all of his family’s farmland, and everything that is closest to him, is connected with the area that belonged to this zone during the occupation.
Footnotes
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Interest Zone of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp - An SSadministered area of over 40 sq. km established in early 1941 after the expulsion of Poles and Jews from the villages near the camp. The inhabitants of one of the Oświęcim districts were also expelled. Its creation reflected the desire of the camp authorities to remove witnesses to the crimes of the SS, as well as to impede contact between prisoners and the outside world; Rudolf Hӧss wrote in one of his reports that “the surrounding populace is fanatically Polish” and ready to help escapees “as soon as they reach the first Polish farmstead”. Another important motive was the confiscation of land for camp farms. By 1943, as a result, about nine thousand people were expelled from the area and more than a thousand houses demolished. The construction material thus obtained was used to build barracks in the Birkenau camp. Later, the SS organized eight sub-camps in the area. Prisoners from these subcamps worked in the fields, raised animals and maintained fish ponds. (Mini dictionary of terms from the history of Auschwitz, auschwitz.org) ↩