At the base of a pine tree, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski bent to touch the black, damp shapes nestling among the fungi and leaf mulch. "I have been watching this area since 2015 and always hope that I will not come across anything more and that one day the entire area will be cleared," he said. However, this was not that day.
The 39-year-old poet, scientist and rock musician was walking in the forest, just meters from the fence of what was once the Nazi concentration camp Stutthof in the German-annexed area of Poland, and which is now a memorial site in Sztutowo. a village 38 km east of Gdańsk on the Baltic coast.
What he was looking for - and what he found over the course of two hours in mid-March - are shoes: hundreds of soles, large and wide, small and narrow, lined with cobbler's holes; soft, thin fragments of leather uppers, their decorative perforations and colors clearly visible, the occasional metal buckle or eyelet visible. Two small, intact soles took Kwiatkowski's breath away for a moment.
Whenever he came here, he said, he was struck "by the softness of the ground, its whole surface strewn with strange hills and elevations." You feel that you are not walking on compressed earth, but on hundreds of thousands of shoes."
Built by the Nazi regime to prosecute Polish political prisoners and later becoming an integral part of the machinery to exterminate Europe's Jews, Stutthof eventually assumed a role as a leather repair collection point for all of Nazi Germany's concentration camps. The shoes transported there - many from Auschwitz, after their wearers had been sent to their deaths - were recycled into leather goods such as belts, backpacks and holsters.
It was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945. In their detailed protocol, a Red Army investigative officer recalled what he and his soldiers found on the camp grounds: "A huge cone-like pile of shoes... which have been there for a long time... tightly compressed... women's, men's and children's shoes of different colors. sizes and dimensions." They estimated the quantity at 460 cubic meters, which in total amounts to "no less than 410,000 pairs of shoes." Other similar piles were also recorded, totaling an estimated 490 tons discovered.
In a museum established on the memorial site in 1962, a large glass box in the former camp canteen houses several thousand pairs of shoes. The rest was thrown away in the forest under communist rule and, as museum directors have since said, "left to nature."
Since encountering many of them nine years ago while making a film about a Polish resistance fighter, Kwiatkowski has campaigned for their rescue and respectful protection.
He has a personal connection with Stutthof: his grandfather and great-aunt were locked up there and had to endure the trauma for the rest of their lives. His grandfather took him there as a child and cried. Kwiatkowski recalled his own shock when he saw the enormous pile of shoes in the museum, and his subsequent bewilderment when he discovered decades later that they made up only a fraction of the total.
The guitarist and singer of Gdańsk psychedelic rock band Trupa Trupa, Kwiatkowski, said his search for the shoes of Holocaust victims "scattered in the forest rotting like death" had become one of the most important of his life .
But it is slow and halting, and on repeated return visits he becomes increasingly discouraged as he sees more and more shoes emerging from the earth.
"Of course they should have been fenced in the first place," he said. "But because that is not the case, they must now be excavated and not only preserved and displayed, but also thoroughly examined by experts to find out who owned them, where they came from, where they were made, in honor and commemoration of the victims. They should be the pride of the museum authorities."
Support for the campaign to save and preserve the shoes has come from families of those who endured Stutthof.
Sanford Jacoby, a distinguished research professor of economic history at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose uncle Hugo Kanter was a slave laborer in Stutthof, said: "Although people tend to forget the endless text on display in museums, they should never forget shoes. if only they could see them, the whole pile. What better education is possible?"
For Kanter, he added, Stutthof was "a horrific place": "The horrific memories of his incarceration were forever embedded in his psyche."
People in Sztutowo say they have been unintentionally unearthing the shoes repeatedly for decades.
Some people especially remember a reconnaissance camp in the 1960s. "It was impossible to secure the tent pegs and poles in the ground because, as we discovered, the entire hill under a thin layer of earth was a heap of shoes," recalled Jerzy, one of the scouts. "It shocked us. We knew where we were... and could only guess that someone had once worn them and died during the war."
The shoes, Kwiatkowski said, have special resonance in an era of increasing Holocaust denial: "The past is not the past, it is the present. Ignoring the artifacts of genocide is a scandal and this scandal reflects it."
Their approach so far is "inextricably linked to the way Poland remembers its own past," he said. While acknowledging the suffering of millions of Poles under the yoke of 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 right-wing populist, national-conservative Law and Justice party, "there was little room for anything other than the characterization of Poles as victims, and certainly a neglect of Jewish memory," he added . "But it is neither healthy nor correct to see yourself only as a victim.
"In this climate it seemed easier to literally sweep the shoes under the rug than to deal with the painful reality of it."
Kwiatkowksi hoped that under Poland's new liberal government led by Donald Tusk's Civic Platform, a more rigorous and honest approach to dealing with the shoes and their history would take place than was possible under its revisionist predecessor.
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"It is an evolutionary process and the country is still divided, but the fact that people turned their backs on nationalism and the rewriting of history that came with it is a huge relief," he said.
Piotr Rypson, the recently appointed head of the cultural heritage department responsible 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 forest department, permission was needed first, he said.
"We have asked the museum to investigate the history of how these artifacts found their way to Stutthof... to contact the relevant authorities to establish an action plan in the area outside the museum's perimeter. [and to] propose solutions for what to do with these artifacts, which are in a state of partial disintegration," he wrote.
Łukasz Kępski, a spokesman for Stutthof, said that although he himself had come across 3 to 4 kg of shoes during a recent excursion with a local TV journalist, it was necessary to go deep into the forest to find them, and to search extensively underneath. to dig. ground. He did not expect any more finds, except those that could be exterminated by wild boars or badgers. The museum, he said, was not responsible for any shoes found, "as the country is outside our jurisdiction."
Kępski and the museum's archivist, Danuta Drywa, an authority on Jewish prisoners in Stutthof, expressed concern about creating an "eBay demand" for Holocaust artifacts. "There are already plenty of trophy hunters here with World War II memorabilia," Kępski said, suggesting that their search for weapons and other items could even be the reason the shoes have resurfaced.
On a recent visit, he led the Guardian to the enormous concrete monument to Stutthof's estimated 65,000 murdered victims - 28,000 of them Jews - which contains human ashes visible through a horizontal window. He pointed to a small door cut into the concrete at the back and closed with a green lock, indicating where he believed the shoes found in recent years had been kept.
When asked about the shoes found near the site, Kępski confirmed that plans to place them "behind glass, to give them their rightful place" would be completed by the end of this year.
The plans include placing signposts in the woods to advise people who may find more shoes to contact authorities, he said. "Not that we expect many more to be found," he added.
Just minutes later, less than eight steps from the museum's gate, Kwiatkowski's blackened hands discovered even more remains from the swampy ground.
