Project Final Solution

"It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory."
"Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes."
"After Auschwitz, the human condition is not the same, nothing will be the same."
Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, Night

Soviet soldiers arriving at the gates of Auschwitz in 1945.

REUTERS:HO AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM REUTERS

It is now 75 years since Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz, opened the gates and met the sight of gaunt, starved prisoners who had managed to survive their years in the concentration and death camp, while others, of a total count of 1,100,000 were sent to the gas chambers, their bodies then incinerated in giant furnaces whose smoke stacks belched black ashes over Poland. It is fitting that liberation of the camp came at the hands of Russian soldiers, since Auschwitz originally functioned as a prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet prisoners of war whom the Germans captured.

Most of those Russian prisoners did not survive their internment in Auschwitz. The camp was later transformed to an extermination camp for Jews. Auschwitz itself was a number of 'camps' linked together, and it also had a slave-labour component camp as well, where relatively healthy and still-strong prisoners (forced laborers) worked in mines and rock quarries or road building until they died of overwork, starvation or disease; in other concentration camps, there were factories producing armaments for the Nazi war effort.

Children who have lived to be liberated by the Red Army from the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945.

TASS via Getty Images

At Auschwitz at the present time, maintained as a museum, there are pavilions housed on site; one primary exhibition details the Shoah. Others curated by a number of countries; a Polish pavilion, and a Russian pavilion among them. Poland, during the Second World War, was occupied by Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union, which first signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, was later invaded by Germany, the two consumed in a massive conflict which Russians endured at the loss of millions of the Soviet Red Army, and millions of citizens. The Soviet victory over the Nazis on the Eastern Front effectively broke the back of the Third Reich, and the Allied victories in the West finished the job.

Nazi death camp of Auschwitz I, in Oswiecim, Poland   AP

But not before close to a million Jewish corpses were fed into the giant maws of the ovens, the greatest number of Jews exterminated in any of the countless death camps strewn all over Europe which succeeded in demolishing the lives of six million European Jews. The Auschwitz site has been preserved as a memorial ground despite calls for its destruction as a 'cursed' place, after the end of the Second World War. It was the demand of the survivors that led to its preservation as a place of remembrance.

Under communist rule, Poland lacked the financial resources to maintain the camp, though the Polish government in 1947 had declared the site would be preserved forever, by law. Lack of resources made it difficult to preserve barracks, barbed-wire fences, watchtowers and gas chambers fallen into ruin. Prisoner artefacts seen to be critical in showing visitors the scale and dehumanization of the atrocities carried out in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp were difficult to maintain without resources.

Jewish children, survivors of Auschwitz, with a nurse behind a barbed wire fence, Poland, February 1945.

Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

The inventory of personal remnants of the millions who passed through those infamous gates declaring "Arbeit Macht Frei" has among its sad treasures of the past, 110,000 shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 12,000 pots and pans, 40 kilograms of eyeglasses, 470 prostheses, 570 pieces of camp clothing, and several tons of women's hair, sheared from the heads of prisoners by the Nazis. These are what is left of the millions of personal effects the Nazis took from helpless prisoners, along with more valuable items including gold pried from teeth, marriage bands, jewellery, to help the Nazi war effort.

The Auschwitz Museum regularly consults with conservationists, historians and heritage experts on preservation and reconstruction with a view to preserving the site as it was at the time. The risk being that alteration of the site might support claims of Holocaust deniers that the reality of the Holocaust has been embellished beyond its actual occurrence, supporting their denials and their claims that the program of genocidal extermination had never taken place.

Poland is where Auschwitz was established and where the Polish pavilion was organized as The Struggle and Martyrdom of the Polish Nation 1939 - 1945. Claiming for itself the place of first victim of the Nazis, emphasizing Polish resistance in occupied Poland. Its focus is on Polish losses, not on the number of Polish and other European Jews who were gassed, their ashes fertilizing the countryside. The Russian pavilion too emphasizes its role, with the theme of Tragedy, Valour, Liberation.

Soviet soldiers with survivors of Auschwitz in 1945.

REUTERS:HO AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM

The world now views Auschwitz as the symbol of Nazi depravity in its vicious extermination of Jewish lives. Before Poland liberated itself from the stranglehold of the USSR, visitors to Auschwitz came mostly through representatives of Soviet satellite countries, with 400,000 annual visits. The turn of the century has seen an increase in the number of yearly visitors to 1.3 million by 2009 and over two million by 2017. The largest number of visitors at the present, come from the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Spain, Germany, Israel and France.

A pathway leading to an observation and security tower between what were electric barbed wire fences inside the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz I in Oswiecim, Poland, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)