New Chapter for Auschwitz: Commandant's House to Welcome Visitors

After decades of personal ties to a haunting history, Garzyna Jurczak has sold the house once inhabited by Rudolf Höss. The Counter Extremism Project plans to open it to visitors, fostering a renewed conversation about the atrocities of the Holocaust.

The mother lived for 42 years in a three-story house overlooking a former gas chamber and a gallows at Auschwitz, sometimes losing sleep at the thought of what had 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 commandant, 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 movie “The Zone of Interest,” had “safety, silence, a beautiful garden,” easy access to a river across the road and, in winter, space for an ice-skating 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,” were tramping through her garden, peering through her windows and reminding her of her home’s connection to the Holocaust.

Last summer, Ms. Jurczak agreed to sell the home to the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based group that wants to open the house to visitors. She moved out in August, and in October the New York group completed its acquisition of the home and an adjacent house built after the war.