Can Auschwitz Be Saved?

Liberated 65 years ago, the Nazi concentration camp is one of Eastern Europe's most visited sites—and most fragile

By Andrew Curry
Photographs by Maciek Mabrdalik
Smithsonian magazine, February 2010, Subscribe

A focal point for visitors today, the gateway sign says "Work Will Set You Free," a monstrous lie told to the men, women and children imprisoned there. (Maciek Nabrdalik)

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Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present

by Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt
W.W. Norton & Co., 1996

Holocaust: A History

by Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt
W.W. Norton & Co., 2002

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Everyone who visits Auschwitz remembers the hair: almost two tons of it, piled behind glass in mounds taller than a person. When I first visited the camp, in 1991, the hair was still black and brown, red and blond, gray and white—emotionally overwhelming evidence of the lives extinguished there.

When I returned this past autumn, the hair was a barely differentiated mass of gray, more like wool than human locks. Only the occasional braid signaled the remnants of something unprecedented and awful—the site where the Third Reich perpetrated the largest mass murder in human history. At least 1.1 million people were killed here, most within hours of their arrival.

This January 27 marks the 65th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation by Soviet soldiers. The Nazis operated the camp between May 1940 and January 1945—and since 1947, the Polish government has maintained Auschwitz, which lies about 40 miles west of Krakow, as a museum and memorial. It is a Unesco World Heritage site, a distinction usually reserved for places of culture and beauty.

But Auschwitz—with its 155 buildings and hundreds of thousands of artifacts—is deteriorating. It is a conservation challenge like no other. “Our main problem is sheer numbers,” Jolanta Banas, the head of preservation, tells me as we walk through the white-tiled facility where she and her 48-member staff work. “We measure shoes in the ten thousands.”

Banas introduces me to conservators working to preserve evidence of camp life: fragments of a mural depicting an idealized German family that once decorated the SS canteen, floor tiles from a prisoners barrack. In one room, a team wielding erasers, brushes and purified water clean and scan 39,000 yellowing medical records written on everything from card stock to toilet paper.

The Auschwitz camp itself covers 50 acres and comprises 46 historical buildings, including two-story red brick barracks, a kitchen, a crematorium and several brick and concrete administration buildings. In addition, Birkenau, a satellite camp about two miles away, sprawls over more than 400 acres and has 30 low-slung brick barracks and 20 wooden structures, railroad tracks and the remains of four gas chambers and crematoria. In total, Banas and her staff monitor 150 buildings and more than 300 ruins at the two sites.

Banas says dozens of barracks have cracked walls and sinking foundations, many in such sad shape they’re closed for safety reasons. Water from leaking roofs has damaged wood bunks where prisoners once slept.

At the same time, public interest in the camp has never been higher. Visits have doubled this decade, from 492,500 in 2001 to more than 1 million in 2009. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, Krakow has become a popular destination for foreign tourists, and Auschwitz is a must stop on many itineraries. A visit is also part of education programs in Israel, Britain and other countries. On peak days, as many as 30,000 visitors file through the camp’s buildings.

The Polish government in 2009 asked European nations, the United States and Israel to contribute to a fund from which the Auschwitz museum could draw $6 million to $7 million a year for restoration projects, on top of its more than $10 million annual operating budget. Last December, the German government pledged $87 million—about half of the $170 million target endowment. (Auschwitz officials had not received a U.S. pledge by the time this magazine went to press.)

“Auschwitz is a place of memory, but it’s not just about history—it’s also about the future,” says the museum’s director, Piotr Cywinski, a hulking man with a thick red beard and a doctorate in medieval history. “This is the most important conservation project since the end of the war.”

Until 1990, the museum’s directors were all former prisoners. Cywinski is just 37. His office is on the first floor of a former SS administration building directly across from a former gas chamber and crematorium. He tells me that Auschwitz is about to slip into history. The last survivors will soon die, and with them the living links to what happened here. Preserving the site becomes increasingly important, Cywinski believes: younger generations raised on TV and movie special effects need to see and touch the real thing.

But the effort to preserve the site is not without its critics. One is Robert Jan van Pelt, a cultural historian in the school of architecture at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the leading expert on the construction of Auschwitz. He supports the preservation of the Auschwitz main camp, although he acknowledges it is a “kind of theme park, cleaned up for tourists.” In any event, it’s a fully equipped museum, complete with exhibits and conservation facilities, where most of the original buildings still stand. But van Pelt views the Birkenau site in a different light. For one thing, 80 to 90 percent of the original structures are gone or in a state of ruin. Most important, it’s where most of the killings took place, so it is a core site of the Holocaust itself. He says letting Birkenau disintegrate completely would be a more fitting memorial than constantly repairing the scant remains. Birkenau is “the ultimate nihilistic place. A million people literally disappeared. Shouldn’t we confront people with the nothingness of the place? Seal it up. Don’t give people a sense that they can imitate the experience and walk in the steps of the people who were there.”

Realistically, the Polish government and the proponents of preserving Auschwitz are not about to abandon the place, but at times during my visit I had some appreciation for van Pelt’s perspective. I arrived on the September day the camp counted its millionth visitor of the year. Cellphone-wielding visitors snapped pictures of the sign at the main gate, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free). Tour group members wearing headphones stood shoulder to shoulder with their guides speaking into wireless microphones.

At the Birkenau camp, a five-minute shuttle-bus ride from the Auschwitz visitor center, the scene was so peaceful it was almost impossible to imagine the sea of stinking mud that survivors describe. The vast expanse was covered in neatly mowed grass. Flocks of Israeli teenagers in matching white-and-blue hoodies wandered from ruin to ruin. As I stood at the stairs leading down into the ruined gas chambers, a dozen Brits posed for a group picture on the steps of a memorial just a few yards away.

Mindful that no mere visit can convey what the concentration camp was like when the Nazis ran it, I met with survivors. The week before I arrived in Krakow, I had called Jozef Stos, 89, to ask if he would discuss his years in captivity. “If I’m still alive then, sure—it’s my civic responsibility,” he said with a laugh. “But I’m pretty darn old, you know.”

Early one morning I met Stos, a retired architect, at his small first-floor apartment on the outskirts of Krakow. We sat in his small, dark dining room, a plate of jam-filled ginger cookies on the starched white tablecloth between us. He said he grew up in Tarnow, Poland, about 50 miles from Krakow. He remembers the day the Nazis shipped him off to Auschwitz: June 13, 1940. It had been almost a year since Germany invaded Poland and launched its campaign to destroy the nation. Following instructions issued by SS chief Reinhard Heydrich—“the leading strata of the population should be rendered harmless”—the SS killed some 20,000 Poles, mainly priests, politicians and academics, in September and October 1939. Stos was an 18-year-old Boy Scout and a member of a Catholic youth organization. Germans put him and 727 other Poles, mostly university and trade-school students, in first-class train cars and told them they were going to work on German farms.

The train wasn’t headed to Germany. Stos was on the first transport of Polish prisoners to Auschwitz. There to greet them were 30 hardened German convicts, brought by the SS from a prison near Berlin. Guards confiscated Stos’ belongings and issued him a number. Sixty-nine years later, he slid a business card across the dining room table as his daughter brought us cups of tea. It read “Jozef Stos, former Auschwitz Concentration Camp Prisoner No. 752.” “I was there on the first day,” he said. “They had me for five years and five days.”

The camp Stos first saw, some 20 brick buildings, was a run-down former Polish artillery barrack the Nazis had taken over a few months before. Many Poles followed Stos to Auschwitz; few were as lucky. In its original incarnation as a concentration camp, Auschwitz was designed to work inmates to death. At first, most of the labor helped expand the camp itself; other work, such as gravel mining and farming, earned money for the SS. The Nazis even had a term for it, Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“Destruction through work”). The notorious SS camp supervisor Karl Fritzsch greeted new arrivals with a speech: “You have arrived here not at a sanatorium, but at a German concentration camp, from which the only exit is through the chimney of its crematorium.”

Prisoners were crammed into the crumbling barracks and provided only a few hundred calories a day. Most died of starvation, exhaustion and diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Beatings, torture and executions were commonplace. Camp doctors conducted experiments—usually fatal—on prisoners, looking for ways to sterilize women with radiation or toxic chemicals, and studying the effects of extreme cold or starvation on the human body. In the first few years of the camp, 80 percent of new inmates died within two months.

Stos said he survived by making himself useful. Prisoners had a better chance of staying alive if they worked under a roof—in a kitchen or an administration building—or had a skill, such as training in medicine or engineering, that made them hard to replace. “The hunger was hellish, and if you could work you could get something to eat,” Stos said. Having grown up in the countryside, he could do a little bit of everything, from pouring concrete to cutting grass. I pressed him for details of his time in the camp, but he spoke only of the work. “I had eight different professions at Auschwitz,” he said. “I knew how to take care of myself. I avoided the worst of it.”

After about an hour, I thanked him and stood up to leave. He handed me a white envelope. Inside was a slim memoir he published nearly 30 years ago. “My memory isn’t so good any more, you understand,” he said, shaking my hand and smiling. “But it’s all in there.” Later, I flipped to a page near the end. In October 1944, Stos was sent from Auschwitz to a series of camps deep in Germany. On May 8, 1945—the day the war in Europe ended—he was liberated by Russian soldiers. On the book’s second to last page is an undated black-and-white photo. It shows Stos with his children and grandchildren standing under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign.

Auschwitz didn’t long remain a camp exclusively for Poles. In June 1941, Germany launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, taking three million prisoners over the next seven months. Many were starved to death. Others were sent to occupied Poland or Germany as slave laborers. In the fall of 1941, ten thousand prisoners of war arrived at Auschwitz and began building the Birkenau camp.

Most of the POWs died within weeks. “When it was time to get up in the morning, those who were alive moved, and around them would be two or three dead people,” one Russian survivor says in the 2005 book Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees. “Death at night, death in the morning, death in the afternoon. There was death all the time.” The prisoners built the barracks at Birkenau in a rush, laying a single course of bricks on poorly made foundations. The flood of Soviet POWs overwhelmed the already crowded camp. Pressure to “eliminate” people—the Nazi euphemism—grew.

Since the beginning of the war, special SS units called Einsatzgruppen had carried out mass executions of Jews and others in conquered territories; these commandos rounded up entire villages, forced them to dig their own graves and shot them. The massacres took a toll even on the German firing squads, says Debórah Dwork, a Holocaust historian at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and co-author (with van Pelt) of Holocaust: A History. “It’s totally clear from Nazi documents,” she says, “that Germans were looking for a way to murder masses of people without having such a traumatic impact on the murderers.”

In 1940, the Nazis used carbon monoxide gas in secret euthanasia programs at mental hospitals in Germany to eliminate mentally ill or disabled people. From there, it was but a small step to Zyklon B, a cyanide compound designed for delousing. In September 1941, Auschwitz guards herded hundreds of Soviet POWs and sick inmates into the crudely sealed basement of Block 11, the dreaded punishment barrack; a guard threw in pellets of Zyklon B and shut the doors. They were the first people gassed at Auschwitz.

For the man in charge of Auschwitz, the gas chamber was a welcome innovation. “I had always shuddered at the prospect of carrying out executions by shooting,” commandant Rudolf Höss wrote in a lengthy confession while awaiting execution after the war. “Many members of the Einsatzkommandos, unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad.”

Guards and other camp personnel refined the procedures in ways that minimized their guilt and maximized efficiency. They soon moved the gassings from Block 11 to the crematorium at the camp’s outer edge. The crematorium would survive the war mostly intact, and today is a central part of any visit to the camp.

“Responsibility is extremely direct in face-to-face shootings,” Dwork says. “In gassing and cremation, each person is given only a small part.” Eventually, Germans took part only by tossing the cyanide pellets into the gas chambers. Everything else—herding prisoners into the chambers, ripping out gold fillings and loading corpses into the crematoria—was handled by groups of prisoners, known as Sonderkommandos.

Adolf Hitler envisioned the eventual extermination of what he called “the Jewish plague,” but the Führer didn’t draw up the plans for the gas chambers or the timetables for the transports. And while it was senior SS officials who gave general instructions about how the camps should function, it was ordinary Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, who worked out the deadly details. “There wasn’t a grand strategy in 1940 that the camp would accrue a number of functions and ultimately become a death camp,” Dwork says. “I do not see it as planned at all. Way led to way, and step led to step.”

By 1942, Auschwitz had mushroomed into a massive money-making complex that included the original camp, Birkenau (officially labeled Auschwitz II) and 40 sub-camps (mostly located in and around the nearby town of Oswiecim but some as far away as Czechoslovakia) set up to provide slave labor for chemical plants, coal mines, shoe factories and other ventures. In their eagerness to carry out orders, advance their careers and line their own pockets, mid-level bureaucrats like Höss implemented what came to be known as the Holocaust.

On January 20, 1942, fourteen such functionaries assembled at a lakeside villa outside Berlin to discuss a “Final Solution” to what was called “the Jewish problem.” What we now know as the Wannsee Conference put on paper plans that Hitler and his subordinates had been talking about for months. Of Europe’s 11 million Jews, those who could work would be worked to death, following the model already created at Auschwitz and other camps. Jews who were not selected for useful labor would be eliminated.

The conference led to a dramatic increase in activity at the Nazi death camps. In a massive campaign code-named Operation Reinhard, Germans killed 1.5 million Jews at small camps deep in the forests of eastern Poland from March 1942 to October 1943. Treblinka and the now nearly forgotten camps Sobibor and Belzec consisted of little more than gas chambers and train tracks. There were virtually no survivors, no witnesses.

Auschwitz is enshrined in history in part because, as a work camp, there were survivors. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was a 14-year-old Jewish cello student living in the German city of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) when the war broke out. Two years later, she and her sister Renate were sent to work in a nearby paper factory. In 1942, after the Germans deported her parents to a death camp, the sisters doctored their identity papers and tried to escape.

They never made it beyond the Breslau train station. The Gestapo arrested them on the platform. The Lasker sisters were accused of forgery, aiding the enemy and attempted escape. After a perfunctory trial and months in a prison, they were sent to Auschwitz in separate transports as convicted felons in late 1943.

By then, Auschwitz was serving as both a slave labor facility and a death camp. As the Germans brought more and more Jews from all over Europe to the sprawling complex, SS doctors selected the fittest for work. Other prisoners were sent directly to Birkenau’s gas chambers for what was euphemistically known as a special action. “Was present for first time at a special action at 3 a.m. By comparison Dante’s Inferno seems almost a comedy,” SS doctor Johann Paul Kremer wrote in his diary on September 2, 1942. Camp records show the transport he observed contained 957 Jews from France; only 12 men and 27 women were selected for work.

When I met her at her house in London, Lasker-Wallfisch, 84, explained that she and her sister avoided the dreaded selection process because they went to Birkenau as convicts. “People shipped from prisons weren’t shipped in huge trainloads of Jews,” Lasker-Wallfisch said. “They were shipped as individuals, which was an advantage. It’s not worth turning the gas on for one Jew, I suppose.” Instead, Lasker-Wallfisch was stripped, guards shaved her head and an inmate tattooed her with an identification number (a practice unique to Auschwitz).

Lighting a cigarette in her airy, light-filled London living room, she shows me the blurred, faded number high up on her left forearm: 69388.

At some point during her induction, Lasker-Wallfisch mentioned she played the cello. “That is fantastic,” the inmate processing her said. “You will be saved.” The Birkenau women’s orchestra, responsible for keeping prisoners in step as they marched to work assignments, needed a cellist. “It was a complete coincidence,” Lasker-Wallfisch said, shaking her head. “The whole thing was complete insanity from beginning to end.”

After less than a year at Auschwitz, Lasker-Wallfisch and Renate were among the tens of thousands of prisoners transported to camps in Germany. Lasker-Wallfisch had no idea where she was being sent, but it didn’t matter. “The gas chambers were still working when we left,” she says. “I was very pleased to be rolling out of Auschwitz. We figured anything was better than the gas chamber.” On April 15, 1945, British troops liberated Lasker-Wallfisch and Renate from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hamburg. Lasker-Wallfisch emigrated to England after the war and became a professional cellist. Her sister Renate worked for the BBC, and is now living in France.

As Soviet troops closed in on Auschwitz in late January 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated some 56,000 prisoners on death marches to the west, then blew up the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria to erase evidence of the mass murders. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Some 6,000 people were still alive at Birkenau. Another 1,000 were found at the main camp.

Fleeing Germans also torched a couple of dozen of the wooden barracks at Birkenau. Many of the camp buildings that were left largely intact were later taken apart by Poles desperate for shelter. Birkenau remains the starkest, most tangible, most haunting reminder of what Dwork says was the “greatest catastrophe Western civilization permitted, and endured.”

Ever since the Auschwitz memorial and museum first opened to the public, in 1947, workers have repaired and rebuilt the place. The barbed wire that rings the camps must be continuously replaced as it rusts. In the 1950s, construction crews repairing the crumbling gas chamber at the main Auschwitz camp removed one of the original walls. Most recently, the staff has had to deal with crime and vandalism. This past December, the Arbeit Macht Frei sign was stolen by thieves, who intended to sell it to a collector. Although the sign was recovered, it was cut into three pieces and will need to be repaired.

Inevitably, Auschwitz will grow less authentic with the passage of time. “You’re seeing basically a reconstruction on an original site,” says van Pelt, the historian. “It’s a place that constantly needs to be rebuilt in order to remain a ruin for us.”

He is not the only one to argue against wholesale preservation of the camp. A 1958 proposal called for paving a 230-foot-wide, 3,200-foot-long asphalt road diagonally across the main Auschwitz camp and letting the rest of the ruins crumble, forcing visitors to “confront oblivion” and realize they could not fully comprehend the atrocities committed there. The concept was unanimously accepted by the memorial design committee—and roundly rejected by survivors, who felt the plan lacked any expression of remembrance.

For the preservation staff, the burden of remembrance informs every aspect of their restoration efforts. “If there’s damage to an object as part of its history, we leave it that way,” Banas says. She points to crates of shoes stacked in a hallway, most with worn insoles and uneven heels—signs of human use that will be left as they are. The International Auschwitz Council—museum officials and survivors from around the world dedicated to the conservation of Auschwitz—has decided that the mounds of hair will be allowed to decay naturally because they are human remains.

After three days at Auschwitz, I was left with the feeling that for some visitors, the former concentration camp is a box to check off on a tourist “to-do” list. But many people appeared genuinely moved. I saw Israeli teenagers crying and hugging each other and groups of people transfixed by the mug shots of prisoners that line the walls of one of the Auschwitz barracks. Walking through the room full of hair still makes my stomach churn. But what I hadn’t remembered from my first visit was the room next door filled with battered cooking pots and pans, brought by people who believed until the last moment that there was a future wherever they were being taken. And when Banas told me about the carefully folded math test that conservationists found hidden in a child’s shoe, I choked up. Even if only a fraction of the people who come here each year are profoundly affected, a fraction of a million is still a lot of people.

There is no more forceful advocate for the preservation of Auschwitz than Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. Born in Warsaw in 1922, Bartoszewski, 87, was a Red Cross stretcher-bearer when the German Army invaded the capital city in September 1939. Plucked off the street by German soldiers a year later, he was sent to Auschwitz. He’d been there seven months when the Red Cross arranged for his release in April 1941—one of the few inmates ever set free.

After Auschwitz, he helped found an underground organization to help Poland’s Jews. He fought against the German Army during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. He was jailed three times: twice as an active dissident during Poland’s early communist era and once for his support of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

Today, he is chairman of the International Auschwitz Council. Nothing, he says, can replace the actual site as a monument and memorial. “It’s great that you can go to a Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.,” he says. “But no one died in Washington in the Holocaust. Here—here is a massive cemetery without gravestones. Here they spent their last moments, here they took their last steps, here they said their last prayers, here they said goodbye to their children. Here. This is the symbol of the Holocaust.”

Andrew Curry’s article on Hadrian’s Wall appeared in the October 2009 Smithsonian. Maciek Nabrdalik is an award-winning photographer who resides in Warsaw.

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Comments (45)

The first sentence of the article says it all, you cannot forget that moment of the visit when you realize that there is a huge room full of hair.

Posted by Mario on November 14,2012 | 04:07 PM

This is truely 100% sad. how and what he did to those poor people. innocent childern, parents, everyone. these stories and videos are very sad and touching. imagine if that was ur family member or even worse maybe you. may we never have this kind of thing ever again. may those souls rest in peace. there shouldnt be no vilence at all in this world because this is an example it doesnt prove anything nor will it your just hurting others around you. the concentration camps the gas chambers the people in it. their bodies are veryy bad. may violence never happen like this

Posted by malayka on April 12,2011 | 08:10 PM

This is truly one of the most touching articles I have ever read. My stance on the subject matter however would be to maintain the visitor aspect of Auschwitz, as the only way for the children of the future to know for themselves what happened during World War two would be to allow them to see it first hand, as the survivors of this mass atrocity are sadly disappearing. However, I believe that the site of Birkenau should be allowed to disintegrate without any human influence or contact whatsoever, and can be left as a place of mourning and grief to represent the destruction and despair brought on by the Nazi and SS regime. No wandering tourists or posing for pictures allowed, simply a untouched place that can only be viewed from afar.
Very well written article, also. Well done Curry.

Posted by Madison on February 21,2011 | 01:23 AM

We can save auschwitz if we try to and if we put our hearts into it. If we all care and spread the stories then we can sucsed

Posted by D'Wayne Watson on February 17,2011 | 10:44 AM

"There is no question as "should it be saved", only why has it not already saved. The only thing that keeps the world from repeating the same terror oven and over is teaching every child what kinds of terrible this has been done in the past by government. There are already countries that clam it never happened. Do not let the "hide it and we can deny it happen crowd win. Memorials do not show what happen and allow people in the future to deny how back things were. Rather as the way native populations were treated when the colonists first arrived in the new world, most of the truth has been lost."

How has this prevented what happened in places like cambodia, as well as other places that have witnessed similar things? Presumably you mean that this places existence will prevent another such occurrance, well it has not, there have been many such places where this kind of thing has happened, unless you mean it only apples to jews and other people can go to hell?

Posted by T.Harm on August 9,2010 | 10:44 AM

I see one blogger commented that she never hears of Theresienstadt, where her step-grandmother was held and forced to watch her husband's cremation. Theresienstadt is not as well-known as some of the other camps because it was considered a "work camp," which of course was a lie, because the prisoners were worked and starved to death. There is an interesting book that touches on this, titled "Divided Lives: The Untold Stories of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany" by Cynthia Crane. It is about Mischlinge, the children born of mixed marriages. Some of the women in the book talk about their mothers being sent to Theresienstadt. As for Auschwitz, it absolutely should be saved. Every civilized country and wealth individuals who can afford it should step up to the plate and contribute to this effort, so that the world never forgets.

Posted by Frank Henderson on April 22,2010 | 01:43 PM

My father liberated it with the 45th Infantry Division. He recalled the horror of it. He told of lying in his bunk at night hearing the machine guns going as the liberated inmates tried to escape. The army was afraid that the prisoners would lead to massive epidemics across Europe, they were so sick.

Posted by paul campbell on March 18,2010 | 02:40 PM

If you charge each of the million visitors $10 a head, there's your $10 million right there.

Posted by Ambrose Benkert on March 15,2010 | 09:18 AM

Auschwitz should be saved as a reminder to mankind how to much power can control an entire society and allow people to disregard the fact that people no matter what race, religion or creed they are human beings with hearts and souls. If mankind can massacure blacks and jews who's next?

Posted by Pamela Mitchell on March 2,2010 | 12:32 AM

What about Auschwitz 3 the slave labor camp where most inmates worked.

Posted by Martin on February 21,2010 | 02:27 PM

This is by fair one of the most emotional articles I have yet to read in Smithsonian. Incredibly detailed, nicely written, and it has a grave impact. Personally, I do believe it should be saved. It is a piece of history. Good or bad, history should be preserved as a reminder of what once was.

This article had me choking up until the final paragraph.

Spot on, Smithsonian.

Posted by Ashley on February 17,2010 | 02:49 PM

I believe Auschiwitz should be preserved for the millions of people to visit in the future to come. To educate themselves of the tragedy Hitler and his puppets have committed. To not forget, to remember and to replace ignorance with education.

Posted by Moses Checa on February 12,2010 | 06:15 PM

There is no question that Auschwitz should be preserved. It is indeed imperative that no one ever forget the horrors of the nazi regime. What never seems to come up, however, is how this regime came to power....never forget the lesson of promises that were made to the German people and how the children were so brainwashed to accept the whole premise of "dirty Jews" to begin with. When the SS terrorized, people turned on each other because of their own fears, the populace was disarmed and could no longer defend themselves, and then turned a "blind eye" to the disappearing people. Many say it could never happen again...I say, "Always be vigilant" The atrocities of the past should be remembered, not by a memorial, but by the "real thing". Don't let the past be "whitewashed". It then becomes too easy for people to believe that it was all propaganda and did not really happen. Recommended reading: "Those Who Save Us" by Jenna Blum.

Posted by C. Borchelt on February 11,2010 | 02:19 PM

There is no question as "should it be saved", only why has it not already saved. The only thing that keeps the world from repeating the same terror oven and over is teaching every child what kinds of terrible this has been done in the past by government. There are already countries that clam it never happened. Do not let the "hide it and we can deny it happen crowd win. Memorials do not show what happen and allow people in the future to deny how back things were. Rather as the way native populations were treated when the colonists first arrived in the new world, most of the truth has been lost.

Posted by Gary Wruck on February 11,2010 | 09:32 AM

There should definitely be a memorial on the site - we must never forget the horrors that were committed at the camps. But save the whole place? No way. Life goes on and living must be done. If our world were at peace, we might try to save the past. But with horrors still happening throughout the world, we need to stay in the present and do what we can to stop the violence and the madness.

Posted by Maria Soares on February 10,2010 | 09:20 PM

I visited Majdanek near Lublin, Poland on a cold September day in 2004. It's not on the tourist path and there were only perhaps 20 visitors walking around. It was probably the most powerful emotional experience I've ever had. One thing I remember well is touching the cage full of children's shoes. I shivered at the thought that kids had worn them and had been killed. I contrasted that experience with my visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington where visitors are kept well away from the exhibits which are behind Plexiglas to protect them. The Majdanek experience was a lonely one I will always remember.

Posted by Patrick on February 10,2010 | 01:50 PM

The comment by Sullen misses the basic message and infers that only those who live there should decide if the camp should be preserved. The meaning of death camps are not only registered in the minds of the people who live there....it must be registered in the minds of all humans. It is up to all of us to remember and to preserve the evidence. The truth of what happened is well established and is THE TRUTH for all of us.

Posted by Bob Caccia on February 10,2010 | 12:19 PM

The question is not can it be saved but rather the statement, 'It must be saved'. Let us not forget the horrors.

Posted by Barbara on February 10,2010 | 11:31 AM

Why does it cost $10M annual operating cost besides the restoration costs being asked for?

I agree the sight should be kept up & cared for. I'm not quite in agreement in keeping all the other locations well preserved due to the world's countries in desperate need of help from USA which is where I am from. I do not know if the money can be kept going forever. I do not wish to sound cold but I am an accountant by trade & not sure if every site could be kept up financially provided for. But absolutely Auschwitz. Please I am not trying to minimize other locations. I am of Lithuanian, Scottish & German descent. My one daughter-in-law is Polish and my husband is Italian. I see what is going on in the world and it is clear we must continue to remind every generation.

I hope one day to visit the site and would like very much to see Auschwitz.

Respectfully

Posted by DJ Chiesa on February 7,2010 | 12:25 AM

There is no doubt in my mind that this place should be saved, and remain as a forever reminder of what people can do to others. Yes, it may not look the same and it may be a much nicer area then it ever was before but it still is a place that great horrors happened. I don't believe it should be commercialized or made out to be part of an even that took place too many years ago to be remembered properly. Quite the opposite, this place needs to be very simply made into a monument of learning. Learning from all the mistakes of others before us so we don't make the same ones

Posted by Christina Mastin on February 6,2010 | 06:15 PM

i honestly think that renovations to restore the camp will in one way or another take away from its reality. the camp should be left alone and allowed to crumble. why renovate this camp and leave so many of the others to disintegrate? eventually the whole place will become one giant cookie cutter museum lacking in any original artifacts and there wont be any one left to tell people what it was really like to be held prisoner in such a horrible place

Posted by Greer on February 5,2010 | 09:23 AM

Auscwitz must be preserved.

I visited Auschwitz in September 2007. It was truly moving, but sanitised. There are very feu buildings left on the Birkenau site, and the Auschwitz I site is clean. Even at that, without seeing the true horror and squalid mess of the place, it made my blood run cold.

Keep it, by all means keep it, but less sanitised. History will be better served if visitors get to see what the Jews and Gypsies got to see, the reality in which lived. Rwanda was a short, vicious explosion, Auschwitz was a long, grinding, de-humanising descent into the darkness within the human soul, all the worse because it was official government policy.

Posted by Bob Mercier on February 4,2010 | 02:28 PM

All my grandparents were born in Poland, but fled the coutry before WWI. My 24 year old daughter and I visited Birkenau and Auschwitz in 1995. I could not stay in the room with children's belongings. Neither of us spoke for hours afterwards. My thoughts were of areas of the United States and other countries that have also experienced slaughter. Both of us believe that history must be seen and told so that another holocaust never happens. I would be glad to monetarily contribute to the preservation of this site. Maybe donations could be requested from the people who believe that Auschwitz sould be saved.

Posted by Carolyn Bree on February 3,2010 | 08:09 PM

I can already hear the "what a heartless a**hole" comments flying my way but I really think it should be allowed to crumble to dust. I believe it fosters more hate than anything else. Is there any reason to continue re-living such a nightmarish period in mans' past? And pardon me but before anyone throws the "those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it" line - it didnt seem to hinder the wholesale slaughter of a number of peoples in the years since then, and I do not believe keeping it alive to haunt untold millions is anything but bad.

Posted by Michael Helweg on February 3,2010 | 07:05 AM

Quoting:

>> I think the question could be, not could we save it, but Should we save it? I think the best answer to this question would come from the people who lived there along with input from their families. Only they know the whole truth of the matter. Find out what they would like done.

Sincerely,
Suellen

Posted by Suellen Mankin on January 21,2010 | 11:57 AM <<
_______________________________________

Suellen,

Your very ignorance of history shows outrageously in your post. If you possessed proper knowledge of history, you would already know the answer to that question.

From the blog Conversations in Klal:

And I will tell my children what I say to you now: Today is only one tiny fraction of not a day of remembrance but of days of remembrance. That remembrance of the Holocaust is something we must do kol yomai chayechoh. And we must pass on this obligation to remember those who died in the Holocaust to our children and our children's children down through the generations "so that their names shall not perish from the earth.'

This is how they have felt since the beginning of the end of the concentration camps.

Posted by Judy on February 2,2010 | 10:30 PM

Absolutely save Auschwitz. However, it should be saved as a SACRED MEMORIAL.

Posted by Sheila Lever on February 2,2010 | 12:39 PM

All of these comments are thoughtful. Having just returned from a week of seeing Auschwitz and Birkenau and some of the remains of the Jewish community of Krakow, I know my wife and I are totally committed to the preservation of these sites. No, a US museum is not the same as being where all those millions died...nor is it being in the tragic nation chosen by the Nazis as the killing field for their work. For those of us in our tour group who are of Polish Jewish or Polish Catholic descent, this was not just a descent into Hell and a reemergence but a chance to focus on our roots and what it means to see the place where what a Jewish poet called "the two saddest nations on earth" were joined forever in suffering.

We may well say "Never again," but for all of us of every nation INCLUDING THE USA, the question is "What part of never again don't we understand?"

Posted by Barry Fruchter on February 2,2010 | 06:52 AM

The physical aspects of Auschwitz and all memorabilia's must be preserved.It will become the fortress for that horror not to happen again.I can't even eat and have a good night sleep by just seeing the photographs at that time to think that humanity can do such a crime.They gas the people and as told by those survivors,mother's slashed the wrist of their children so as not to suffer extreme pain at the arriving train coaches,wher some are half-mad already because of lack of food,drins,sleep,cold and a trembling heart.Germans call them as figurins or dungs,anyting of no importance is allowed to call them but not people or humans.That's why it happened in our modern times.So many did not even realize it happened.
Here in the Philippines I felt glad to find out in History that the city that I lived today have a piece of care and support for those Holocaust survivors who will find safety and refuge abroad.Marikina was allocated at that time.,unluckilly..we are also attacked by Japanese,13 people were martyred in my village in Trece Martires,Casiguran ,Sorsogon

Posted by Joey C. Hebres on February 2,2010 | 03:00 AM

My Great grandpa, Great-grandma, my uncle’s, aunts and grandparents both sides they all were in KZ. Those were the "lucky" one u might call, but the truth is that those people who survived this horrible place they rather died there because of the horrible memories they carry with them.
My great grandpa always changed the subject, when I started questioning him about the KZ. He was one of the gipsy workers and he saw too much he always said. I think for us it is a great opportunity to learn and always remember about what happened, but for those who survived this holocaust, wished that all wouldn’t be there no more. I can just talk for my families who survived and wished that there would be nothing to get reminded off.

Posted by Jasmin on February 1,2010 | 02:21 AM

I do not understand the USA'S delay in giving funds to help save this valuable part of history. We hesitated then, and share our part in the delay of the salvation from the atrocites that were committed, before we finally stepped in and did our Part. Let us step up, and "save" these memorials to the past, so that we will "Never forget".

Posted by Ann on February 1,2010 | 01:30 AM

It is not surprising that the camps are falling apart. They were never meant to last long, just long enough to eliminate a people. I have mixed feelings abour preserving this place. On one hand I feel it should be kept as a reminder of man's inhumanity to man and as a warning to what can happen when ideology supercedes reason and logic.

On the other hand, I fear that is also will stand as a monument to the monsters and hateful ideas of those who created it. A monument to the ruthless efficiency of hate. Perhaps another monument to those who suffered and died there, and at the other camps, while the actual buildings and crematoria are relegated to the scrap heap.

Posted by Gerard Trigo on February 1,2010 | 11:13 PM

The Citizens of the United States have made more than a "pledge" to maintain these sites. They sent their sons, fathers and brothers to die by the tens of thousands in order to stop it.

Posted by Greg Theriault on February 1,2010 | 09:41 PM

I think Auschwitz should be preserved for all the world to see and remember how HORRABLE we as humans can be. The Nazi regime was heartless,cold blooded,and a bunch of cowards in my book.Hitler,Himler and countless others felt it was there duty to extermanate a "lesser race" inferior people such as the Jews. It makes me more mad every time I read about these storys, how someone can think a precious life, any ones life, is up to them to extinguish. I can only hope that this piece of history,morbid as it is,withstands the tests of time, lest we forget who lies lurking in the depths of some men's souls.

Posted by Jim Hink on February 1,2010 | 07:56 PM

I think this would benefit from a virtual reality tour. Technology today can provide an experience unlike any before. Save some of the significant structures and build several viewing rooms with the latest technology that can allow people to experience the brutality in a way never seen before. I think it can be extremely powerful to watch the presentation, then be taken outside to the train tracks, barracks, work areas, and then the crematorium. God knows there isn't anything they could put in the experience with dramatic license that the Nazis didn't actually do to these poor people.

Posted by Izgler on February 1,2010 | 06:57 PM

I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau in May 2008, and cannot describe the feeling. There were teenage students on a school trip, and they were crying hysterically. I believe Auschwitz needs to be preserved for two reasons. One, the world needs to know that the holocaust happened, and that it can, unfortunately, happen again if we let our guards down. And two, it is a cemetary so to speak for loved ones to visit their family members who were killed there. The history that can taught in a trip to Auschwitz is absolutely amazing.

Posted by Kelly Parise on February 1,2010 | 05:09 PM

I don't see how you couldn't preserve Auschwitz. We need to remember always what others have done and been through. My ancestory is from Germany and I shutter to think, how many of those children and families could have been in some way a part of me? This would be the 1 thing that my country(US) could donate money for that would make sense to me. Our future learns from our past and our past cannot be erased it's there always. What greater lesson could be learned by students than to actually see and learn how unhuman humans can be to one another. And the surviors will not be around forever to remind us, we need to preserve this huge piece of our history for future generations. I truly hope & pray that some of those who do visit Auschwitz are not there just to mark it off their "to do" list, this is a part of all of us and should be visited in respect to the many lives that were lost there.

Posted by Robin on February 1,2010 | 05:00 PM

The worst thing that could happen now would be if no one visited anymore. To learn that visitor numbers are increasing is wonderful. While some may have a profound experience, if others, that are simply ticking a tourist 'must-do' off their list, think about what happened there for only a moment, then their visit has been worthwhile too. Personally I do not believe that too much should be done to maintain the buildings. I'm surprised to learn that the barbed-wire needs to be replaced every year. That should stop. Only preservation work that doesn't involve major replacement of items should take place with the full expectation that over time the remains will 'return to Earth.' Otherwise the site will become some kind of Disneyland of death. A contemporary Museum must always endure at the site no matter what remains of the actual original buildings and contents. It is the visiting of the location where the atrocities took place that is relevant to a memorial experience, not just seeing the decaying structures and certainly not to see modern-day reproductions of what once stood there.

Posted by Brian Connor on January 30,2010 | 07:04 PM

Why would someone like van Pelt, who fought the legal battle against David Irving on the existence of Auschwitz, contemplate its erasure ? I find this notion bizarre and absurd. Of course we need to preserve Auschwitz ! Having been there 11 times with students from the U.S., I can't imagine teaching this history without this site. Thank goodness for the survivors whose early work preserved the historical reality of Auschwitz and built an education center worthy of visits by travellers from around the world.

Posted by on January 28,2010 | 09:48 PM

I love reading commentaries such as those left for this article...My say? Save it. Preserve it.Preserve as many of them as we can.

The debate is understandable and welcome in my mind, but the very root of it should be a sacred right and responsibility to save these sites, much as they have done with a portion of the massacre sites in Rwanda.....not as a glorified tourist attraction, but as a monument of possibility and an instigator that will continue to create ripples of positive change.Humans can be brutal and ignorant, and we can also survive and change the world. How do we choose to do so? Let these sites spur us to a greater concern for ourselves and others...

The same can be said of other sites...Wounded Knee...Gettysburg....Hiroshima....

I love the comment about the scar on a child's heart and the memory of place...but no heart is ever unscathed, and this scar of memory is one worth preserving and revisiting, and then also, should be allowed to heal over-but never ignored....This is an innocence that needs to be faced and framed.....Because of this story, I have moved my plans to visit these sites up....to see them before this debate is concluded...Thanks for a great article.

Posted by Dale J. Young on January 28,2010 | 03:27 PM

My father, a teenager in Warsaw during the Holocaust, forbid me to visit Auschwitz when I visited Poland in 1993. My mother made arrangements for me in secret to go. When he eventually found out, he wept for the scar on my heart that would be permanent. But I still tell him I needed to see. We all need to see. I certainly hope the U.S. devotes funds soon.

Posted by Alana Margeson on January 27,2010 | 01:00 PM

I have been visiting Auschwitz since 1962, then it was just the camp, no shops, a wooden kiosk sold some books in the car park.
Most of the original barracks were still locked, but I managed to view inside one of the very dirty windows of a locked building, and seen straw on the floor of the room with scattered metal plates. I guess that the room was closed after clearing out the inmates, and that memory will stay with me forever.
I still cry when I visit the children's clothes in the museum.
Never again, we say, unfortunately the some of the world leaders disagree.

Posted by John Nieurzyla on January 26,2010 | 11:30 PM

Our choir visited in 2003. Standing in front of the wall where prisoners were executed was moving. But standing in front of that wall singing a hymn with the words "love is strong as death" was beyond moving--It was confusing, heartwrenching and tearful. Tears come to my eyes still when I think of it. What happened in this place cannot ever be forgotten. How best to preserve the memory is beyond me, but my experience at this place will never allow me to forget.

Posted by JA Nordlee on January 25,2010 | 06:00 PM

So many deep emotions felt during this reading - I actually felt I was there.

I visited Dachau. I know this is so trivial in light of this so serious subject, but I was so upset that I couldn't see for days. And Dachau was an "easy" camp. At least, that's what I understand.

I believe Auschwitz and all its sister camps should definitely be viewable for all. It's such a, help me, such a defining horrible event in human life, that it should be a lifelong reminder.

Posted by gertie on January 25,2010 | 10:22 AM

I never hear of Thereisenstadt(sp.?)
My step-grandmother was imprisoned there.
She was made to watch her husband being cremated.
She survived by knowing one of the guards who was a childhood friend of her sons.
Slips of paper were handed out each day to prisoners who were to be exterminated.
The guard would put her slip into his pocket, thereby letting her live.
She had scars on her scalp and pictures of bodies of starved people in her possession.

Posted by sandi vogel on January 24,2010 | 06:34 PM

I think the question could be, not could we save it, but Should we save it? I think the best answer to this question would come from the people who lived there along with input from their families. Only they know the whole truth of the matter. Find out what they would like done.

Sincerely,
Suellen

Posted by Suellen Mankin on January 21,2010 | 11:57 AM

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Can Auschwitz Be Saved?

Liberated 65 years ago, the Nazi concentration camp is one of Eastern Europe's most visited sites—and most fragile

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