Ashes to ashes: artists and architects collaborate to create a powerful, sobering memorial in Poland

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2005 by Rob Gregory

The Belzec Cemetery continues a powerful tradition of monuments that literally build upon the horror of past events. Instead of shying away from the scale of the atrocity--be it a killing field, a battlefield, the site of a massacre or in this case the site of a former Nazi death camp--such monuments reuse often vast areas of land in an attempt to freeze history, cast in stone the scale of lost life, and to make something strangely beautiful and moving from something that derives from absolute evil. Haunting and mysterious, such places use abstract expressionism to capture negative energy and transform it into something with new life. Avoiding conventional, religious or morbid symbolism, sculptors, fine artists, poets and architects trace lines of meaning within the landscape to plot their story through space.

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Here in 1942, at Belzec, south west of Tomaszow Lubelski, a former Nazi work camp was turned into a six-hectare death camp. Almost unfathomably, during the 9-month period that year from March to December, over 600 000 people were murdered; Jews from the south Polish ghettos, Bohemia and Germany together with Poles accused of aiding the Jews were among the victims. Only two people ever escaped.

Following a design competition in 1997, sculptors Andrzej Solyga, Zdzislaw Pidek and Marcin Roszczyk set about transforming the six-hectare site in collaboration with architects from DDJM. Their developed competition-winning scheme comprised three elements: the monument, a museum building, and an exhibition.

The dominant form of the monument occupies most of the large rectangular site centring on an oblique crevice or path that dissects the monumental burial ground. The path cuts through the gently rising surface of the cemetery, a black ash burial field, within which mass graves are marked as ghost-like territories with subtly differentiated grades of material (blast furnace slag mixed with cinders and barren soil). Defined at one end by the Square, a cast-iron relief set flush in the ground which marks the entrance to the burial ground, the path terminates in a monumental light-hued granite wall; a spatial sequence that engulfs visitors as they approach the wall, cutting through the burial field that rises to a dwarfing 9m height. Walking between concrete walls, cast against rough earth as shuttering and topped with buckling steel reinforcement bars, visitors disappear into the unknown in a symbolic journey that recalls the death of the thousands who were lost without trace. Passing thresholds that draw lines between life and death, most are reduced to silence before being confronted by the imposing granite screen wall. A structure that in its relief recalls the blood spilt and the familiar patina of bullet-peppered walls. Standing opposite this wall, polished concrete niches are covered with the names of victims. Names also frame the burial field as a low wall forms a horizontal stone frieze that chronologically lists Jewish communes recalling the sequence of transports.

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With these powerful layers of meaning set within a muted yet dramatic reconstructed landscape, you could very easily miss the cemetery's museum building. Set in a low-lying 2m high structure that forms part of the southernmost boundary wall, the unadorned bunker-like structure cuts into the ground to contain, among a series of more conventional exhibition spaces, an empty and haunting reinforced-concrete Void-Hall; a space which resonates with the isolation, pain and ultimate death of millions of lost souls; and more specifically the hundreds of thousands of people who died on this very site.

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