by At the base of a pine tree, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski bent down to touch the black, damp shapes that lay among the fungus and leaf mulch. “I’ve been monitoring this area now since 2015, and I’m always hoping that I won’t come across anything more and that the whole area will be cleared one day,” he said. This was not, however, that day.
The 39-year-old poet, scholar and rock musician was walking in the forest just meters from the perimeter fence of what was once the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp in German-annexed Poland, now a memorial site in Sztutowo , a village 24 miles (38km) east of Gdansk on the Baltic coast.
What he was looking for – and what he found, over two hours in mid-March, he found – were shoes: hundreds of soles, big and wide, small and narrow, and on the border with cobbler support holes; soft, thin fragments of upper parts of leather, their decorative perforations and colors clearly visible, the odd metal buckle or eyelet revealed from time to time. Two safe little coins took Kwiatkowski’s breath away from the point.
Every time he came here, he said, he was struck “by the softness of the land, by the whole surface which was covered with strange mounds and elevations. You feel that you are not walking in a dense world but on hundreds of thousands of shoes.”
Stutthof, built by the Nazi regime to persecute Polish political prisoners and an integral part of the machinery for the deportation of European Jews, eventually assumed a role as a collection point for leather repairs for all concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The shoes brought there – mostly from Auschwitz, after they had been executed – were recycled into leather goods such as belts, backpacks and holsters.
In May 1945 he was liberated by Soviet forces. In their detailed protocol, a Red Army investigating officer recalled what he and his soldiers found on the camp premises: “A large cone-like pile of shoes … lying there for a long time … tightly compressed … women’s shoes , males and children of different sizes and measurements.” They estimated the quantity to be 460 cubic metres, calculating, in total, “no less than 410,000 pairs of shoes”. Another pile of the same type was also recorded, so that a total of 490 tons was found.
In a museum established on the memorial site in 1962, thousands of pairs of shoes are housed in a large glass case in the camp’s former canteen. The rest was thrown into the forest under communist rule and, as museum directors said from then on, “left to nature”.
Since he came across many of them nine years ago while making a film about a Polish resistance fighter, Kwiatkowski has been campaigning to rescue them and keep them respectfully safe.
He has a personal connection to Stutthof: his grandfather and great-aunt were imprisoned there, and the trauma lasted for the rest of their lives. His grandfather would then take him as a child and cry. Kwiatkowski recalled his own shock when he saw the large mound of shoes in the museum, and the subsequent stupefaction when he discovered, years later, that these were only a fraction of the whole.
Kwiatkowski, guitarist and singer of the Gdańsk-based psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa, said his search for the shoes of Holocaust victims “found scattered all over the forest rotting like death” was one of the most important of his life.
But it was slow and falling, and on repeated return visits he is increasingly desperate to find more shoes emerging from the earth.
“Of course they should be fenced, first of all, right from the start,” he said. “But that is not the case, they should now be dug up, and not only preserved and displayed, but examined in detail by experts to find out who they belong to, where they came from, where they were made , in honor and in honor. commemoration of the victims. The museum authorities should be proud of them.”
Support has been given to the campaign to save and preserve the shoes from the families of the victims of Stutthof.
Sanford Jacoby, distinguished research professor of economic history at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose uncle Hugo Kanter was a slave laborer at Stutthof, said: “Although people tend to forget the endless text displayed in museums, they would never forget these shoes, if only they could see them, the whole pile of them. What better education could there be?”
For Kanter, he said, Stutthof was “a terrible place”: “The terrible memories of his imprisonment were forever embedded in his psyche.”
People in Sztutowo say that they have been finding the shoes again and again, inadvertently, for years.
Many people especially remember a scout camp in the 1960s. “It was not possible to secure the pegs and poles of the tent in the ground, because as we discovered, the whole hill under a thin layer of clay was a mound of shoes,” remembered Jerzy, one of the scouts. “It shook us. We knew where we were … and it was just a guess that someone wore them once and died during the war.”
The shoes have particular resonance, Kwiatkowski said, in an age of growing Holocaust denial: “The past is not the past, it is the present. Ignoring the artefacts of genocide is a scandal and radicalization leads to that scandal.”
Its handling so far has been “closely linked to the way Poland remembers its own history”, he said. Recognizing the suffering of millions of Poles enslaved by Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union, Kwiatkowksi said there was “no excuse not to deal with the whole truth”.
Under the previous government, led by the rightwing public, a conservative national Law and Justice party, “there is little room for anything other than the characterization of the Poles as victims, and certainly the neglect of the Jewish memory”, he said. “But it’s not healthy or right to see yourself as a victim.
“In this climate it seems easier to sweep the shoes under the carpet than to deal with the painful reality of them.”
Kwiatkowksi hoped that under Poland’s new liberal government led by Civic Platform Donald Tusk, there would be a tougher and more honest approach to dealing with the shoes and their history than was possible under his predecessor reviews.
“It is an evolutionary process and the country is still divided, but it is a great relief that people have turned their backs on nationalism and rewritten history accordingly,” he said.
Piotr Rypson, the recently appointed head of the cultural heritage department with responsibility for all museums in Poland, said in an email that his department was aware of the shoes found near the site and had asked Stutthof directors to “provide solutions”. . But because the area around the museum was owned by the state forests department, their permission was needed first, he said.
“We asked the museum to investigate the history of how these artefacts made their way to Stutthof … to contact the appropriate authorities to create an action plan in the area outside the museum’s perimeter. [and to] propose solutions for what should be done with these artifacts, which are in a partially disintegrated state,” he wrote.
Łukasz Kępski, a spokesman for Stutthof, said that although he himself came across 3-4kg of shoes on a recent trip with a local TV journalist, it was necessary to go deep into the forest to find them, and dig extensively underneath. land. He did not expect more discoveries, except those that a wild boar or a badger might root out. The museum, he said, was not responsible for any shoes found, “as the land is outside our jurisdiction”.
Kępski and the museum’s archivist, Danuta Drywa, an authority on Jewish prisoners at Stutthof, expressed concern about creating an “eBay demand” for Holocaust artifacts. “There are already a lot of trophy hunters of World War II memorabilia here,” Kępski said, suggesting that their rummaging for guns and other items could be the reason the shoes have resurfaced.
On a recent visit, he led the Guardian to the massive concrete monument to Stutthof’s estimated 65,000 murdered victims – 28,000 of them Jews – where human ashes can be seen through a horizontal window. He pointed to a small door cut into the concrete at the back and sealed with a green lock, to show where he said the shoes found in recent years had been placed for safekeeping.
When asked about the shoes found near the site, Kępski confirmed that plans to put them “behind glass, to give them their rightful place” were to be finalized by the end of this year.
The plans included putting up information posts in the forest advising people who might find extra shoes to contact the authorities, he said. “Not that we expect to find many more,” he said.
Moments later, less than eight steps away from the museum fence, Kwiatkowski’s black hands were uncovering more remains from the marsh soil.
