The mother lived for 42 years in a three-story building overlooking the former gas chamber and hung in Auschwitz, sometimes losing sleep at the thought of what happened on the other side of her garden wall.
But the house in Oswiecim, southern Poland, once the home of the death camp’s wartime commander, Rudolf Höss, was “a great place to raise children,” said Garzyna Jurczak, 62, a widow who raised two sons there.
The home, the subject of the Oscar-winning film “The Zone of Interest,” had “security, quiet, a beautiful garden,” easy access to the river across the street and, in the winter, space for an ice rink for her two boys, she said.
Alone in the house after her husband died, she finally decided to leave. One reason, she said, was that she was disturbed by people who, after watching “The Zone of Interest,” walked in her garden, peered through windows and reminded her of her home’s connection to the Holocaust.
Last summer Mrs. Jurczak agreed to sell the house Project against extremism, a group based in New York that wants to open the house to visitors. She moved out in August, and in October a group from New York completed the purchase of the house and the neighboring house built after the war.
“I had to get out of there,” Ms Jurczak said at her new home in a modern apartment block in Oswiecim, a mile from her former home. She declined to say how much the home sold for, but indicated it was slightly more than the property’s appraised value of about $120,000.
Mark Wallace, a lawyer and former US diplomat who is executive director of the Counter-Extremism Project, also declined to give a price, saying only that his organization “wanted to do right” by Ms Jurczak’s family but “didn’t want to pay a huge premium for a former Nazi property, even if we could.”
Now the house, at 88 Legionow Street, just outside the camp fence, is preparing to receive public visits for the first time, as part of the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museumthe Polish institution in Oswiecim, dedicated to the memory of Nazi victims, will host dozens of world leaders on January 27.
In the house, the workers hired by the new owners removed 14 waste containers and tore down the wallpaper and other post-war additions. Because of this, the property remains much the same as when the Höss family lived there from 1941 to the end of 1944, including a Nazi-era lock on the bathroom door that says “frei/besetzt.”, German for free/occupied.
A mezuzah, a parchment containing Bible verses, is attached to the front door frame in honor of Jewish tradition – and a rejection of the fanaticism of its former occupant, the commandant of Auschwitz. After the war, Commander Höss recalled how the successful experimental gassing 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 on gallows between his former home and the Nazi crematorium.
On a table in the ground floor corner room that Commander Höss used as a home office is a pile of torn and crumpled Nazi-era newspapers and other wartime artifacts found after the house was sold. There is also a coffee mug stamped with the seal of the SS and a bottle of German beer.
From the attic, where they had been pushed to plug the hole, striped pants once worn by an Auschwitz prisoner were pulled out. Researchers are trying to figure out who wore them by deciphering the faded prisoner’s number, written next to a small red triangle indicating the wearer was a political prisoner and an almost-gone yellow star indicating a Jew.
“This house has been closed for 80 years. It was inaccessible to the victims and their families. “Finally, we can open it to honor the survivors and show that this place of incredible evil is now open to all,” Mr Wallace said.
The plan is, said Mr. Wallace, turn the house, along with the neighboring property, into the Auschwitz Research Center for Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, a new organization that will work to expand the “Never Again” pledge from historical memory to current action.
Piotr Cywinski, a Polish historian and director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau museum since 2006, said his state institution wants to preserve its core mission of memory, but sees value in supporting a project focused on the present and future as well as the past.
“The fight against today’s reality is easier for a non-governmental organization than for a state institution,” he said, complaining about the rise of populism across Europe, which he calls “the cancer of democracy.”
The new center will encompass the entire territory of Commander Höss’s wartime estate, including the long sealed garden area where he met with Hitler’s security chief, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” doctor, and other Nazi dignitaries tasked with the extermination of the Jews. Daniel Libeskind, an American architect, was commissioned to redesign the property.
Mr. Libeskind said he has drawn up preliminary plans that call for the interior of the house to be turned into a “void, an abyss” – the exterior walls are protected UNESCO conservation order — and building a new partially buried structure in the garden with meeting rooms, a library and a data center.
More than two million people visit the former Auschwitz camp each year and, the architect said, leave “horrified and mesmerized by death” but also to “confront contemporary anti-Semitism and other extremism in our political culture.”
Jaczek Pulski, director of a Polish anti-extremism group involved in the project, said he wanted to use the house and the Nazi horrors of the past as a weapon against what he sees as a resurgence of extremist ideologies.
“A house is a house,” said Mr. Pulaski, looking through the window on the second floor of the former Höss house towards the chimney of the former Nazi crematorium. “But extremism today happens in uninteresting, ordinary houses like this one.”
Ms. Jurczak, the former owner, said she still struggles to reconcile happy, ordinary memories of the house with its gruesome past.
Recalling the time her family spent there, she stopped short: “I worry that I sound like Mrs. Höss,” she said, referring to the commander’s wife, Hedwig Höss. In the film, Mrs. Höss refers to her Polish home as “paradise” and is shown trying on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner sent to be slaughtered by her husband.
The commander’s wife, Ms. Jurczak concluded after watching the film, “was perhaps even worse than her husband,” in her indifference to human suffering.
While awaiting execution in a Polish prison after the war, Mr. Höss, a former commander, wrote an autobiography that Primo Levi, an Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, described as the work of a “grey official” who “evolved step by step into one of the greatest criminals in history.”
The house where Mr. Höss was built between the two great wars of the last century by a Polish military officer who served in a neighboring military camp, which was taken over by the Nazis after the 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 gas chambers.
It was seized by the SS as a home for the commandant of Auschwitz, who changed the street number to 88, the numerical code for Heil Hitler, the house was returned to the original owner after the war and later sold to the family of the husband of Mr. Jurczak, who owned it until last year.
Mr. Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau museum, said he was ready to cooperate with the Counter-Extremism Project in its efforts to combat extremism.
Extremism, he said, “unfortunately is not a mental illness; it’s a method” that exploits widespread feelings of frustration.
Ordinary people with ordinary ambitions, he added, can turn into monsters.
Mr. Höss, he said, “was a wonderful father to his children and, at the same time, the main organizer of the most brutal murders in the history of the world.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.
