The Collective Memory of Auschwitz [610441]

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Anexa 8

MINISTERUL EDUCAȚIEI NAȚIONALE
UNIVERSITATEA PETROL – GAZE DIN PLOIEȘTI
FACULTATEA: LITERE ȘI ȘTIINȚE
DEPARTAMENTUL: FILOLOGIE
PROGRAMUL DE STUDII: CONCEPTE ȘI STRATEGII DE COMUNICARE
INTERCULTURALĂ
FORMA DE ÎNVĂȚĂMÂNT: IF

Vizat
Facultatea: LITERE ȘI ȘTIINȚE
Aprobat,
Director de departament,

LUCRARE DE DISERTAȚIE

TEMA: The “Collective Memory” of Auschwitz

Conducător științific:
Prof. Univ. Dr. Ionescu Arleen -Nerissa
Absolvent: [anonimizat]
2017

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Contents

1. Argument ………………………………………………… ………. 2
2. Introduction : A History of Extermination . ………………… ….….3
3. The Concentration Camp of Auschwitz …………………… …….14
4. Destiny , Luck or Ambition ? – Survivors of Auschwitz ………… .28
5. Conclu ding Remarks ……… …………………………………… …45
6. Bibliography ……………………………………… …………….. 48

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Argument

In a society devoid of meaning and full of stereotypes, people tend to become selfish and
egoistic . They forget the past, think about their future and disregard the present not taking into
account the moral and ethical aspects of life.
The “Collective Memory” of Auschwitz follows the story of the “Auschwitz Museum”, a
story told throughout testimonials from the survivors, but mostly throughout its architecture and
structure. One can say that a visit to a museum may turn out to be boring and dull, without
having any captivati ng elements which can awake your interest. In reality, once you visit the
museum you realize that those simple “barracks”, the elements presented there are really
engaging and tormenting.
The decision of writing this paper is connected to my visit to The “Auschwitz Museum”
which turned out to be a difficult one, as I expected, but at the same time a challenging one. I
have always been interested in History and its effects upon human relations and evolution, but
Auschwitz is more than that. It is a visual place, a place where each exhibit interacts with its
visitors, “ it deals with the fundamentals of human experience of objects .”1
The paper is structured into three main parts: “Introduction : A history of Extermination ”,
“The Concentration Camp of Auschwit z” and “Destiny , Luck or Ambition? Survivors of
Auschwitz.”
The introductory part encompasses all those historical elements and significant events
which are connected to the Holocaust and which may help to better understand its evolution.
“The Concentration Camp of Auschwitz” analyzes the architecture of “The Auschwitz Museum”
and the most important elements which help the visitor get back to the life of the camp and, at
least at a small level, understand the trauma lived by the Jews.
Despite al l the harsh life spent at Auschwitz, some of the victims managed to survive and
got the chance to tell the others the atrocities they had to endure. They needed time to get over
that experience, but they are still trying to get answers to questions such as “was it destiny, luck
or ambition?” which made them survivors of the Holocaust.

1 Sandra H. Dudly, Museum Materialities. Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (New York: Routledge, 2010), 22.

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Introduction : A History of Extermination

History may be understood or may contribute to an explanatory scheme of the individual,
of the world, of the general trajectory of humanity, but not if it is associated with the negative
aspects left behind . Just as individual memory helps to understand the personal behavior, we can
assert that collective memory helps humankind to understand the past. History has a very
important role in the development of a nation, because it is the main premise that accelerates the
economic progress. The basis of a society’s life is found in the pages of history. It is proof of an
incredible experience and multilateral development of ancestors. It is said that without the past
there can be no future, so we must pay attention to that written test that has been formed over the
years and that continue.
History plays a very important role in the development of a people, as it is the main
premise that acc elerates the economic progress. The basis of a society’s life is found in the pages
of history. It proves an amazing experience of multilateral development of ancestors. It is said
that without the past there can be no future. The development is a set of actions that promote the
emergence of better conditions for human existence. History is a book of life, of wisdom that
helps us enrich our intellectual baggage. We must not ignore the past, because it opens our eyes,
enlightening our way to the future. It is history that gives the identity of a people. It is like a
mirror that reflects at one point the past of nations, together with success, troubles, sufferings,
failures and victories. History revives the past and bears the readers in those times. It is a book of
life, of wisdom that, if reread it, enriches our intellectual baggage with a great experience. We
must not ignore the past because it opens our eyes to illuminate the way to the future.
We are the result of the past, knowing our past, we will know how to coordinate our
future. History often warns us of the possible dangers that can be expected on the road of human
civilization. All history teaches us that, although knowing enough causes, members of some
communities often repeat the same mistakes. I n matters of significant events which changed the
course of history, which changed people’s lives is by far the Holocaust.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe was synonymous with modernity,
having for centuries been consolidated as the most prosperous continent in the world, as a cradle
of art, culture and thought at the forefront of science and technology. Paradoxically, from the
hand of progress, germinated fascism and theories of racial superiority. The Holocaust happened

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in a civilized co ntinent, cradle of the art and the culture, to the vanguard in science and
technology and immersed in the modernity and the progress.
The original Greek word “holókauston” comes from the Hebrew term “olah”, which
means complete incineration, designating an ancient Jewish sacrificial practice in which pieces
of animals or plants were burned on the altar in honor of Yahweh.2The Holocaust is the name
given to a genocide which refers to the attempt of the Nazis and their collaborators to
exterminate the Jewish people. Other genocides committed by the Nazis during the Second
World War were the genocide of the Poles and that of the so -called gypsies. These were attempts
to destroy a group of people which ended in mass murders. However, the genocide of the Jewish
people was unprecedented in its totality: it attempted to exterminate any man, woman or child of
Jewish origin.
The ‘history of the Holocaust’ cannot be limited only to a recounting of German po licies, decisions,
and measures that led to this most systematic and sustained of genocides; it must include the
reactions (and at times the initiatives) of the surrounding world and the attitudes of the victims, for
the fundamental rea son that the events we call the Holocaust represent a totality defined by this very
convergence of distinct elements.3
A clear appreciation based on the information about Holocaust helps to understand the
context of mass atrocities, genocide, and human rights violations. That is why it is important for
today’s young people to un derstand these past events in order to be able to see what is happening
in the world around them today. The Nazi ideology was based on the argument of race
superiority and was transformed into long -term state policy, a policy which would be
remembered for a very long time as Alvin H. Rosenfeld states in his book entitled The end of the
Holocaust :
The Nazi genocide of the Jews will not soon be forgotten, but h ow it is retained in memory and
transmitted depends overwhelmingly on what we choose to recover from the past, on what we
choose to ignore or suppress, and on what we choose to remodel or newly invent. The historical
character of the crimes that we have come to call the Holocaust is open to alteration under the
pressures of a broad range of cultural forc es, including political expediency, commercial gain, and
popular tastes and preferences. Even without these pressures, the horrific nature of these crimes,
while a source of endless fascination, is subject to unconscious denial.4

2Tracey R. Rich, “Qorbanot – Sacrifices and sufferings” (2011), http://www.jewfaq.org/qorbanot.htm last accessed
June 7, 2017.
3 Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939 -1945 (New York:Harper Collin’s
e-books, 2008).
4Alvin H Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011 ), 48.

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At the end of World War I, the victorious countries forced Germany to sign the Treaty of
Versailles, imposing severe territorial, military and economic restrictions. On the verge of
political and economic collapse, a new democratic regime was established, known as the Weimar
Republic, which lasted until 1933. However, the Weimar Republic could not contain
unemployment and poverty. When a slight recovery finally loomed, an international crisis
followed, caused by the fall of the New York Stock Exchange, whic h ended up devastating
Germany. This plunged the country into a serious political crisis in which various extreme right –
wing movements emerged, including the National Socialist German Workers Party, known as the
Nazi Party. It was a fascist party combining extreme philosophies such as racism, anti -Semitism,
social Darwinism and claimed the supposed superiority of the Aryan race that was to rule the
world. Their leader Adolf Hitler intended to eliminate the races and ethnic groups he considered
inferior and to establish in Germany a supreme government, in which politics, economy, culture
and society were under his absolute control. Hitler was characterized by a racist discourse,
channeling the popular resentment and promising to return to Germany the greatnes s of other
times. Numerous crowds marveled at Hitler’s rhetoric, convinced that certain minorities,
especially the Jews, were responsible for all the ills that afflicted the country.
The Nazi Party (NSDAP), led by Adolf Hitler, came to power in Germany on January
30th, 1933. The doctrine of this party was deeply anti -Semitic. With the Nazis coming to power,
the persecution and exodus of the 525,000 Jews in Germany began. In his autobiography , Mein
Kampf (1925), Hitler had openly asserted his hatred of the Jews, and he gave ample warnings
about his intentions to remove him from Germany’s political, cultural and intellectual life. In
1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived German Jews of citizenship and
all civil rights.
Hitler’s use of th e Jews promoted step -by-step dehumanization of races. At the top of the
pyramid was the German race and at its base, t he Jews, who were considered a “subhuman” race
to be eliminated. Other races, considered inferior, were treated in a discriminatory manner . The
Nazi ideology relied on irrational myths to promote the prospect of the world’s danger of Jews.
They were planning a new organization of the world according to racial stagnancy. The
dehumanization of the Jews was accomplished in several ways: by modi fying laws, by
imprisoning them in concentration camps, by forcing them to hard labour, or by sending them to
extermination camps.

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The “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem, also known as the Holocaust (or, in German,
the “entgultige Lösung der Judenfrage ” and in the Hebrew “Ha -Shoah”) represents a euphemism
for Nazi Germany’s plan to annihilate all Jews in Europe, as well as their efforts in this regard
between 1941 and 1945. The intensification of hatred towards the Jewish people took place
during the pe riod of power of the Nazi party. This hatred culminated in the July 1941 decision by
Hermann Goering (who had a second position in the German Reich) to charge Reinhard
Heydrich with the execution of the Final Solution. The exact date on which the Nazi lead ers
decided to carry out the “Final Solution” , the plan to annihilate the Jews, remains uncertain. The
genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of Nazi policy under Hitler’s rule.
After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 (the beginning of Wo rld War II), anti –
Semitic policy was developed in a detailed plan to concentrate and eventually annihilate
European Jews. The Nazis first created ghettos in the General Government (a territory in central
and eastern Poland in which the Germans created a Ge rman government) and the Warthegau (an
area of western Poland annexed to Germany). Polish and Western European Jews were deported
to these ghettos.
The Germans considered the Jews the most ardent enemies. The Nazi Party has
developed a program on February 24th, 1920 which stated that non -German citizens could not
live in Germany only as guests, that they had no political rights, that they could not be
considered as citizens of the country. They argued that “race” is determined by “blood” . For
them, the Germ an race was a race of “gentlemen.” It must be kept pure, unmixed with “inferior”
races. The German people were the superior people. They believed that they alone had the right
to conquer as many territori es as they could for the final “purification” .
The b iggest dreams of the Nazis were to dominate everyone, eliminating inferior races.
As soon as the Nazis came to power, a flood of exclusions and bans strike the Jewish population.
They are excluded from public service; they are prohibited to practice a profession, to perform
active military service, or to have marriages between Jews and Germans. The Jews are required
to add to their name “Sara” or “Israel” , they are denied access to social assistance, and the
unemployed are forced to work with low monthl y income. They can no longer refuse to work
forced labor even if they have a job. They are paid into the agreement and are not entitled to
leave or have social benefits: it is thus completed their limitation to slavery. They had limited
hours of access to the shops, because they could only buy after the Germans finished their

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shopping. Many packages from abroad were seized. A conference in 1942 sets out to cut food
that Jews can buy: Jews can no longer buy cakes, white bread, baby supplements, whole milk.
The extermination camps were the invention of Hitler and culminated in the use of modern
technology for the physical and chemical liquidation of prisoners. Throughout the war, the
application of Jewish extermination for technical reasons and for the security of those who
enforced the orders was slow. ( e.g. in Russia, prisoners were forced to dig pits on the edge of
forests and then they were shot.) Burial of thousands of bodies raised technical problems by
protecting the danger of epidemics and eventu ally they found the technical solution with their
gas and, eventually, burning them.
In the so -called “Kristallnacht” (Crystal Night), on November 9th, 1938, the Jews were
attacked and their properties were vandalized throughout Germany. Annually, Novembe r 9th
marks the International Day to Fight Racism and Anti -Semitism, which reminds of the day the
Nazis unleashed anger against Jews not only in Germany, but also in other countries , a day that
has remaine d in the memory of mankind as “Kristallnacht” and it marked the beginning of the
Holocaust in Europe. Named in German Kristallnacht , Reichskristallnacht , Reichspogromnacht ,
Novemberpogromnacht , this moment marked an unfortunate succession of days and nights of
terror against the Jews, which lasted from 9 to 13 November 1938.
The “Crystal Night” motivation was an offense committed on November 7 in Paris by
Jewish Polish teenager Herschel Grynszpan, the death of German diplomat Ernst von Rath. The
young man has imagined that he can thus avenge the sufferings and humiliations of his parents
because of the orchestrated and implemented policies of the Nazi authorities in Germany. More
specifically, on October 27, 1938, Grynszpan’ s family and 15,000 other Jews of Polish origins
were expelled from Germany without a ny prior warning, but they were held at the Polish border,
humiliated, enduring cold and hunger.
Following the announcement of the crime at the German broadcasting, after which, in
several German cities, the demons of anti -Semitism were launched, they sta rted violent anti –
Jewish actions, but they took on the Hitler express order on November 9 through the voice of the
propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who held a speech in Munich, ordered the destruction of
Jewish shops and the burning of synagogues, ord ered the police not to interfere, and the
firefighters to prot ect only the properties of the “ Arians” and forbid looting.

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On the night of November 9 to 10, in many annexed German and Austrian cities and
villages, were many violent actions against the Jews , in which both Sturmabteilung and SS
(Schutzstaffel), members of the Gestapo, police, as well as civilians instigated in the propaganda
hatred by Goebbels and destroyed everything Jewish in their path. The vast majority of German
citizens did not particip ate in violence or robbery but did not even oppose them.
Thus, hundreds of synagogues and prayer houses were destroyed and burned. People were
mocked, beaten and, in some cases, killed, in the street, only because they were Jews. The police
did not interve ne and the firefighters only acted to prevent fire from spreading to neighboring
buildings. The systematic destruction of buildings with the baroque, especially of the places of
worship and of the shops, filled the streets with glass fragments from the bro ken windows, hence
the name “Crystal Night” – the night of the broken glass. Also, despite Goebbels indications,
hundreds of synagogues were robbed, Jewish religious books were burned in the streets, and
countless young gangs had stolen valuable cult items . Moreover, after this veritable slaughter,
Goebbels forced the Jews to cleanse the remains of destruction themselves, they were fined with
one billion marks, the state confiscated the insurances to the Jewish owners who had to be
compensated, and the Jewi sh properties began to be transferred to the “ Aryans ” account with
minimum compensation.
Although most historical sources refer to the event, indicating the duration of a single
night, in reality, as we have seen, the violence ended only after five days. T his happened despite
the cynicism of Joseph Goebbels, who announced on the radio on November 10 t hat the excesses
are over. The “Crystal Night” moment was the beginning of the general pogrom against the Jews
inWestern European countries – the Holocaust, th e Nazis pursuing the total liquidation of the
Jews.
Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps,
over 7,000 Jews and 1,668 synagogues (almost all of the German synagogues) were damaged or
destroyed. Similar events too k place in Austria, particularly in Vienna. After the invasion of
Poland, the Nazis set up ghettos in the years 1941 and 1942 in which the Jews were forced to live
until they were eventually sent to the extermination camps or killed. The Warsaw Ghetto was the
largest with 380,000 people, and the Łódź ghetto was the second with 160,000. The issue of
Jewish treatment became an urgent matter for the Nazis after September 1939, when they
occupied the western half of Poland, where two million Jews lived, so that from the 1st of

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November 1941, the first extermination trials were built: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno,
Majdanek and Auschwitz -Birkenau. The mass executions of the Jews began in 1942, when the
final solution to the Jewish problem was adopted at the Wansee conference.
The Germans created two types of camps: extermination: Auschwitz II, Belzec, Chelmno,
Sobibor, Treblinka and concentration camps: Dachau and Belsen, mainly located in Germany
and used as places of imprisonment and forced labor for vari ous enemies of the Nazi regime
(Such as communists or homosexuals). In all Nazi camps, the number of deaths was great due to
starvation, sickness and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were built specifically for
mass extermination. The extermina tion camps were run by SS officers. A method commonly
used in killing the Jews was the Z yklon B gas.
Another distinctive feature was the widespread conduct of medical experiences on
detainees. German doctors conducted such experiments in concentration camp s. The most
famous of these doctors was Dr. Josef Men gele, who worked at Auschwitz. His experiments
included putting subjects into pressure rooms, testing drugs, freezing them, attempting to change
the color of their eyes by injecting chemicals into childr en’s eyes, various amputations and other
brutal operations. As for the number of Jews who died during the Holocaust, after 1945, the
number was set at six million.
Between 1933 and 1939, special efforts were made by the Nazi Party, government
agencies, ban ks and the business world to eliminate Jews from economic life. Non -Aryans were
freed from public posts and Jewish lawyers and doctors were losing almost all of their clients.
Jewish firms were either liquidated and their property confiscated or bought at prices much lower
than their true value by companies that were not owned or not run by Jews. The transfer of
Jewish businesses to German employers was called “ Arianization” . The gains of any sales, as
well as the savings of all Jews, were subject to specia l property taxes. Jewish employees of
liquidated or aired firms lost their jobs.
At the start of the Second World War in September 1939, the Nazi army occupied the
western half of Poland, adding nearly two million Jews to the German power sphere. The
restrictions imposed on Polish Jews were much tougher than those in Germany. The Polish Jews
were forced to move into ghettos surrounded by walls and barbed wire. These were like captive
cities. Each had a Jewish council that was responsible for hosting, sanita tion, and production.
Food and charcoal were to be brought in and the goods had to be sent out. The food supply

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allowed by the Germans, however, mainly consists of cereals and vegetables such as carrots, and
beets. In the Warsaw ghetto, the official rate o nly provides 1200 calories per person. Black
market food introduced into ghettos was sold at high prices, but unemployment and poverty were
widespread. The dwellings were overcrowded, with six or seven people in a single room, and the
typhus appeared.
During the introduction of the ghettos in Poland a much more drastic action was launched
to the east. In June 1941, German armies invaded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) and, at the same time, the SS deployed 3000 people in special units on the new occupied
territories to kill all the Jews on the spot. These mobile detachments, known as the
Einsatzgruppen (action bands), soon underwent continuous execution. The massacres were
usually in ditches or ravines near the cities. From time to time there were soldiers or locals there.
Soon, murder rumors began to reach the capitals of the world.
One month after the commencement of mobile operations in the occupied USSR, Herman
Göring, the second man in the Nazi Germany leadership, sent a directive to the R eich Security
Service ( Sicherheitsdienst – SD) entrusted with organizing the “ final solution to the Jewish
problem” throughout Europe under German occupation. Until September 1941, the Jews in
Germany were forced to wear badges or ban ds marked with a yello w star – “the star of David.”
In the following months, tens of thousands of people were deported to the ghettos in Poland and
the captured cities of the USSR. While this operation was underway, another horror was
prepared: the death camp.
Bearings equipped with facilities for gasification were built on the territory of occupied
Poland. Most of the potential victims were to be deported from nearby ghettos. Only 300,000
people have been displaced from the Warsaw ghetto. The first consignments were usually mad e
of women, children or older men who could not work. Capable Jews were stopped in shops or
factories, but they were eventually killed. The largest deportations took place in the summer and
autumn of 1942. Destinations of transport were not disclosed to Je wish communities, but rumors
about mass killings eventually came to survivors as well as governments in the United States and
the United Kingdom. In April 1943 , the 65,000 remaining Jews in Warsaw opposed the German
police who had entered the ghetto for a last meeting. The fighting lasted for three weeks.
Before and during the war, it was a common thing for people to cross into Switzerland,
driven by the persecution of the Nazis, to deposit their values in Swiss accounts. Permissive

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banking practices and strict laws on bank secrecy favored the concealment of Nazi fortunes.
Swiss banks allowed people to open accounts and deposit values into identifiable accounts only
by a number or set up under false names on behalf of corporations or for others. While t hese
rules made it easier to conceal the goods before and after the outbreak of World War II, their
recovery later became almost impossible. Since many of these accounts lacked essential
information, such as the real name of the possessor of the property, it was very difficult to claim
them by the victims of the Holocaust or their heirs after the end of the war. Laws on bank
secrecy have also made any attempt to recover lost assets to be almost useless. The Jews who
lived in the post -war communist countries found it even harder to claim their values because of
the travel restrictions they were subjected to.
An unpredictable result of the anti -Semitic struggle in Europe was the establishment of a
Jewish state. The Holocaust deepened the desire of survivors and Zionists (Jewish nationalists) to
establish Palestine as a state capable of defending all remaining Jews in the world. Pressures
were exerted on the Allies to establish a permanent refuge for surviving Jews here.
Finally, the ONU General Assembly rec ommended the separation of Palestine into
separate Arab and Jewish states and the creation of international enclaves that included
Jerusalem and Bethlehem, both of which have places of particular religious importance for
Muslims, Jews and Christians. While the plan of division was accepted by most Jews, Arabs
inside and outside Palestine found this solution unacceptable. Until now, the hostility created by
the creation of Israel threatens peace and stability in the Middle East. The establishment of Israel
three years after the defeat of Germany was thus a delayed effect of the Holocaust.
The basic rating of World War II statics is by far the greatest war in history in terms of
human expense and material resources. In all, 61 countries with 1.7 billion peopl e, 3 quarters of
the world’s population took part . A total of 110 million people w as mobilized in military service,
more than half of USSR (22 -30 million), Germany (17 million), and the United States (16
million).By far the most frightening event was the d eliberate killing of millions of women, men
and Jewish children deported from Germany, Poland and other nations occupied by Nazi
concentration camps.
Prior to the war, the persecution of the Jews in Germany, and later in Austria and
Czechoslovakia, took t he form of their dismissal from work, property confiscation and
preventive arrest and various other humiliations, as their forcing to wear the Star of David

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publicly. Prior to 1942, Special German units have indiscriminately killed Jewish, Polish and
Russi an Bolsheviks captured in Poland and Russia. In 1942, a conference of German officials
revealed plans for a more “scientific” approach to the Holocaust, which included gathering
together these people – like other gypsies and gay men – in execution camps wh ere they were
exterminated in rooms with Gas and then they were incinerated. In some camps, 10,000 of these
people were gassed every day.
Just like this monstrous extermination program, the human cost of the war worsened most
of the belligerents. The USS R lost the most – at least 20 million of civilians and killed military
personnel – including large numbers of Russian prisoners deliberately hungry to death in war
prisoners’ camps. Poland lost about one -fifth of the civilian population. Allied civilian lo sses
were 44 millio n; A xes have lost 11 million. Military dwellings in both camps in Europe
numbered 19 million and the war against Japan 6 million (which included a conspicuous number
of Allied prisoners hungry or tortured to death in the Japanese forced labor camps in Burma and
other parts). Only the United States was saved from significant losses with 292,131 military
deaths in the battle and 115,187 military deaths from other causes.
At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the entire secular and rel igious culture of
the Jews in Europe had been destroyed and between 5.6 and 5.9 million Jews had been
exterminated. Of these, about 1.5 million were children. After the war, the Allies organized an
International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, to judge the surviving Nazi leaders for
war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the most important war crimes trials, conducted in
1945 and 1946, 22 leading Nazi Germany leaders were found guilty and 12 of them were
sentenced to death. In addition, civil a nd military courts in many countries have conducted
hundreds of other lawsuits. Allied occupation governments in Germany have removed tens of
thousands of Nazis from their official positions. Only 90,000 war crimes cases have been
handled in Germany alone. Later, in 1948, a UNU resolution determined that any crime against
humanity is subject to international law, without being able to prescribe the prosecution of those
accused of such crimes. Based on this resolution, France has condemned a number of former
Nazis, and the United States has revoked the citizenship of several Nazi collaborators who
immigrated to this country.
All these atrocities committed during the Second World War left a black mark in the soul
of Jewish people who have “visited” the exterm ination camps. They have always stated that they

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forgave, but they would never forget, that their aim is to make the others remember the past. All
these attempts, all these flashes of sufferings are mirrored in museums, individual spaces which
take you bac k to those times as Peter Eisenman states assume that “the kind of intellectual
curios ity and angst” that is in his buildings and writings has some Jewish sensibility.”5

5Johan Ahr, “Memory and Mourning in Berlin: OnPeter Eisenman’s Holocaust – Mahnmal,” downloaded from
http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/ at East Carolina University on April 26, 2015, accessed June 7th 2017.

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The Concentration Camp of Auschwitz
If you visit for the first time the site Auschwitz Memorial you get precious pieces of
information about the traces of past which create the tragical history of the Holocaust. Most of us
question why one should visit the museum, why is there such an important place for us to visit
and to get an important lesson from the history of the Holocaust. The answer comes right from
the website of the museum:
We travel to “Auschwitz” to see traces of the past, acquire knowledge of the history of the camp and
the Holocaust of the Jews, and to see and understand how the crimes were perpetrated there. But
there is more. Visiting the site of the former camp may also be an op portunity to ask yourself
questions: How would I have behaved back then? How would I behave now if I had to make a
difficult choice in face of evil? How should I behave for this to never happen again?6
You usually visit a museum in order to gather around t he historical elements which form the
general view, but in the case of Auschwitz there is more. Once you visit this memorial you are a
different person, a part of your inside changes and you start seeing life with different eyes. Many
say it is hard to talk about the Holocaust. It is a subject that still divides the world categorically:
did it take place, has been bad or horrible, or has it been good and for which reasons. The views
are divided and many of them cannot be changed.
Few places were the sce ne of tragedies as large as the Auschwitz -Birkenau camps in
southern Poland, where more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were exterminated by the
Nazis seventy years ago. As this disturbing museum looks, as the horrors of seven decades ago
are told, a nd which pictures come in completing the narrative facts you can find out right from
the source. The message of the museum is clear: learn as much about the Auschwitz crimes, so
that in the future this will not happen anywhere. Some say it is a museum, som e say it is a
memorial, but above all these opinions there is the pedagogical aspect:
The question was never whether there would be only a memorial or a museum. But rather: In
addition to these already existing pedagogical houses of memor y, was there room as well for a
commemorative space meant for memorial contemplation and national ceremonies? Again, we
concluded that in Berlin's constellation of memorial sites, there was indeed room for a central
memorial node in this landscape, one that would inspire public contem plation of the past, even as it

6“Auschwitz Memorial”, last accessed June 12, 2017, http://en.auschwitz.org/lekcja/12_miejsce_pamieci/

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encouraged the public to visit and learn the specifics of this past in the many other museums nearby
and throughout the country.7
When you visit the museum, you feel the burden of those souls on your shoulders
instantly. Involuntarily, their story calls you, as a confession, a testimony that still requires your
healing. Far from the eyes of th e world, here history is alive . He sends everyone a sorrowful
squeal. Jews, gypsies, Poles, Russian prisoners of war reun ited in that awful place. They left their
traces in the hair strands in the walls of the Polish camp.8
The Auschwitz Concentration Camp Museum is located in the Polish city of Oswiecim,
50 kilometers from Krakow. The city is at intersection of DN44 with t he local road 933. There is
also a railway linking the city of Krakow and Katowice – a reason that helped to choose the place
for the concentration camp. The Auschwitz I (Auschwitz I) museum is located in the western
part of the city, where you can either get there by bus or on foot (about 30 minu tes walk).
Situated at the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers in southern Poland, at the beginning of
the Second World War there were barracks in the suburbs of the Polish city of Oswiecim
(German Auschwitz) . After the invasion of Poland by the German army and because there was
also an important railway node in the locality, the Nazis thought that many Polish and Russian
prisoners could be transported, mainly and subsequently people from across Europe, formin g the
largest concentration camp, a real mass killing center. Here 1.6 million people – Jews, Gypsies,
Poles, Russians and so many others found the ir end so tragically and inhuman from the summer
of 1940 until the summer of 1944 . The Auschwitz camp became a “model” camp, and the Na zi
response to the question of “why?” was connected to the idea of purification t hat “there was the
place of purification of the human race,” the only measure of purifying the world from the lower
elements. At the time of the construction of the camp, one of its promoters, commander SS
Heinrich Himmler ordered to raise a barbed wire fence, under electric tension with thick walls,
around the camp and to build observation towers, equipped with guns. Thus, Auschwitz has
become the impenetrable place where once you entered; you could only choose the road to death.
The tour at Auschwitz -Birkenau starts at the front of the famous gate with the inscription
“Arbeit macht frei”, which means “ work makes you free” , then you will be led to the

7James E. Young, “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem -and Mine”, The Public Historian , 2002, 71.
8Marin Raica, “Muzeul Auschwitz”, Jurnalul.ro (2009), last accessed March 8, 2017.
http://jurnalul.ro/special -jurnalul/reportaje/muzeul -auschwitz -524320.html

17
administrative buildings of the camps, where life and death decisions were made on the
prisoners. Under this slogan, another fiery proof of the cynicism of the Nazi rulers, the most
abominable crimes in the history of humanity, which exceed any limit of imaginable and normal,
healthy thoughts, were executed. The central element of the camp was and is undoubtedly the
inscription on the gate “Arbeit macht frei”.
According to Rudolf Höss, who was an adjutant at Sachsenhausen before he became the first
Commandant of Auschwitz, the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” means that works liberates one in the
spiritual sense. Sachsenhausen was a Class 1 camp, where prisoners who worked had a good chance
of being released. After World War II, the Sachsenhausen camp was turned into a Communist
prison for German citizens. The Arbeit Macht Frei sign was removed and the prisoners did not
work. Höss was himself a prisoner at one time and he complained about having to sit all alone in a
prison cell without having any work to occupy his time. When Höss9 was transferred from
Sachsenhausen to Auschwitz, he had the “Arbei tMacht Frei” slogan put over the entrance gate into
the Auschwitz main camp, which became known as Auschwitz One.
It has often been said that the vast majority of Germans were completely foreign of the
crimes and monstrosities of the Nazi leaders. Moreover, it was claimed that no one believed that
such horrors were happening. In the book, Murderers Among Us10, Simon Wiesenthal tells of a
German officer who probably was not a Nazi and who treated prisoners in the camp in a human
manner and spoke with him in one of the days at the end of the war. According to Wiesenthal’s
statement, if he were in America, he woul d tell the truth, he would tell what he saw and felt, that
German officer answered: “Truth? But will he believe you? Who can believe that such horrors
have occurred, if they have not lived them?” The cynical symbol, intended for the ministry of
the people and the whole world, as well as the freshmen brought to the camp, remained the
slogan “Arbeit macht frei” (work makes you free). Symbol of the lie, which today can represent
both aspects of the Holocaust, both Jewish. Therefore, whoever works will be free , he/she will
not be sent to the gas chamber. As if freedom had been born in the famous death camp, and
arrest, deportatio n, racism, anti -Semitism, gas -assassination would have been self -evident. The
work would be to release those who are destined for these sufferings. A false statement, a false
idea, an endless lie told to all of them with indifference. The work was intended both for the
deportees detained and their extermination. And the deportees, the detainees who were brought

9Tracey R. Rich, “Qorbanot – Sacrifices and sufferings”, 12.

18
to the camp, did not have to see everything from the beginning, they did not have to know from
the beginning what was waiting for them. Like any potential passers -by, passing by the gate of
the camp, and they were not supposed to know what was inside. In Wiesel’s book, Night, we
follow the strong relation between a father and a son who go through very hard moments. One of
those moments is represented by the selection in which they manage to es cape: “With all my
strength I began to race toward Block 36; midway, I met my father. He came toward me: “So?
Did you pass?” “Yes. And you?” “ Also.” “We were able to breathe again. ”11
Better to see something else, though deportees and detainees themselves knew what was
waiting for them. Perhaps a false self-complacence , based on a slogan written on the gate, would
lie so much that poor people might start believing a lie that they knew was a l ie, in a state of
desperation. Moreover, he would work effortlessly, with the hope that he may be able to get the
release or at least to survive, to remain alive. Of course, not everything started with death, but it
ended with death. Initially, it was slav e labor, which the Nazi masters wanted as intensely as
possible, with the most and the best. Initially, the Auschwitz camp was a labor camp, becoming
the extermination camp afterwards. From the beginning, the deportees were divided into two: the
good and t he poor. The latter were sent directly to death, and they did not even have the chance
to do what the slogan “Arbeit macht frei” suggested. The former were used to any exhausting
work to the end, when they themselves became ill. Then they shared the fate of those in the
second category: death by gassing. The work did not release them, it only killed them. Death
based on hatred, bestiality and ignorance was the reward of labor.
While visiting the camp , you find out shocking details of how deportees arrived in the
camp, by train, after a long journey and 11 -12 days without food and water, promising them a
new life and jobs. Moreover, some of the prisoners were even set to pay f or their long journey
with the “train of death” . On the walls of buildings aged by the weather, real pictures of what
happened over seventy years ago will make you understand the injustice of over one million
innocent people, exactly where you are at that time.
Once they were brought by train to the camp, transported in absolutely inhu man
conditions, worse than cattle, people were “quartered” . The German SS troops performed the
sorting in a way that cannot be explained in human words, but, perhaps, giving only the
diagnosis of madness. The elders and children were separated from those w ho were fit to work.

11 Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 98.

19
After a medical consultation, the triage continues. The poor men did not even know what they
were expecting; most went on their last journey, a unique way, the road to eternity. The Germans
brought the poor people inside a building, wh ere they said they have to have a shower, but
actually there was the worst death waiting for them: the action of the gas. Through the ceiling of
the gas chambers came the lethal gas Zyklon B, used as a fighting gas.
The Germans have shown to the whole wor ld that they have been exaggerated, an
“underestimated” thing, for which the most appropriate word has not been invented yet to call
those men who have taken so many human lives. What was the blame for the children and
women who were tested and tortured in the famous Block 10 used as guinea pigs for all kinds of
experiments that far frightened actions? What was the fault of civilian men who were not
prisoners of war, but who were simply ordinary people? After killing them, the Nazis took all
their goods, in cluding golden teeth, and the hair was “recycled” and use d in German industry.
The only “guilt” of the poor people was that Jews and Gypsies were born and, in the insane
opinion of the Nazis, represented a stain on the human race.
Workers were sorted sepa rately and kept in worse conditions than animals. There were
some barrages, like stables on which some straw was thrown as a bed. The immense pain that
lived between the walls of those terrifying wooden barracks, where thousands of innocent,
hungry, desper ate, frightened and sick souls were clinging to the limit of survival. It is something
that, I think, cannot be understood, no matter how much you struggle to find an explanation of
how logical it is.
Initially, the camp was made up of 22 red brick barracks, of which much remains today
testimony to those tough times. In just 2 year s since its establishment, the “accommodation
capacities” of the camp have become insufficient and so has expanded. At that time the camp
was made up of three segments:
Auschwitz I was the initial concentration camp, used as an administrative center for the
entire complex. It was the headquarters of the political department (SS headquarters) and the
detainees’ labor department. Here again, most of the stores with supplies an d workshops were
also in the main camp. Here was the place of the executions of approx. seventy thousand people,
most of whom were Russian and Polish war prisoners. Auschwitz I, the initial concentration
camp, which was used as the Auschwitz administrative center for the whole complex, was also
the scene of the executions of some 70,000 people, most of the Polish and Soviet war prisoners.

20
Each Block bears a number, and the first barrack to be visited is numbered 4 and it is called
“Extermination”. The exhib ition here is based on the exposure of some photos taken during that
period, as well as some plans for the location, arrangement and organization of these
extermination camps, an exhibition from which visitors can realize that the whole mechanism
was devis ed by the Nazis very carefully. What a visitor sees at the entrance of the first barrack is
a quote from George Santayana posted on a wall: Auschwitz “Who does not have the memory of
history risks repeating it” just like Young emphasizes in his book The Te xture of Memory :
Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of memory are never pure. Both the reason given
for Holocaust memorials and the kinds of memory they generate are as var ious as the sites
themselves. Some are built in response to traditional Jewish injunctions to remember, others
according to a government's need to explain a nation's past to itself. Where the aim of some
memorials is to educate the next generation and to inculcate in it a sense of shared experience and
destiny, oth er memorials are conceived as expiations of guilt or a self-aggrandizement. Still others
are intended to attract tourists. In addition to traditional Jewish memorial iconography, every state
has its own institutional forms of remembrance. As a result, Holo caust memorials inevitably mix
national and Jewish figures, political and religious imagery.12
There are old photos of people huddled in wagons, children, women, men, when elders and
children were separated from working groups and taken to the gas chambers. The cadavers were
taken away by other Jews, their hair was cut off, their golden teeth were taken away, and then
buried in a field by other Jewish prisoners.
Those remaining alive stayed in the so -called quarantine quarters. Although among them
there were doctors, teachers, musicians, people with flourishing careers, they were all mocked at
and hungry for the mere fact that they were born Jews or Gypsies. Although they were working
on their flesh, they received a single soup dish at 12.00 and two chicory cups in the morning and
a six -day trip to keep them alive for three months. They had at their disposal the toilets where
they could go only once a day ; they slept on mattresses or on wooden beds three in a single
place.
The 5th “Evidence of Crime” barrac ks – which I visited later –are terrible, and
photographs are forbidden here. There are showcases on the trip 2 in which is the prisoner’s hair
which was cut for use in the fabrication of textiles. There i s also a showcase with a huge pile of
goggles gathered from the dead, the suitcases inscribed with their names, huge piles of shoes,
baby things. All these objec ts were collected by the group “ The Canada Kommando”, a group

12 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 13.

21
mainly made up of women and dealing with the collection, sorting and arranging of personal
items confiscated from prisoners including vessels, prostheses, textiles, glasses, toothbrushes,
brushes, cosmetics. At the exit of the barracks, t here was the call sign (called “report”),
“Appellpl atz” in German. Everyone should be present at this report, regardless of weather or
health. Including people deceased during the night; everyone had to be present at the report. This
is how the deceased had to be taken out of roommates and presented to the report. The presence
was made by shouting the number each detainee was wearing. There was a number that, at the
entrance to this camp, the prisoner received and which was tattooed on his hand for
identification. Once they were in the camp, they had no names, no identity, they were only
figures. The l ongest call lasted 19 hours because someone had disappeared.
Next is Barack Number 6 – “Life of prisoners” – which contains an exhibition that shows
a lifetime of a prisoner, starting with the registration of each person, as well as marking the
indications of the provenance and “type of prisoner” . Also , here is the way of organizing classes
of prisoners, depending on the status that a particular prisoner could receive. For each barrack, a
sort of leader was chos en among the prisoners, called “ Kappo”, which received some facilities, a
better bedroom. Often, these “ Kappo”, were worse than the Germans, we were told.
The 11 barrack – “The death block” – sheltered the torture camps. It was the place where
a trip would punish a prisoner. Once a prisoner entered thi s block, he would not go out alive. The
punishment was generally applied by a prisoner who had no choice. The guides tell here a story
about the locals of the barrack 14 from which three people escaped. As a punishment, for every
escaped prisoner, the tent h prisoner in th ose barracks was to be taken to the torture room or was
publicly executed, a very good way to give an example to the others . When someone wanted to
flee, he was stopped by the others in the barracks in order not to be punished or killed.
The barrack number 10, which cannot be visited, was the place where the prisoner
experiments were carried out by Dr. Carl Clauberg. There were also Dr. Horst Schumann, Dr.
Eduard Wirths, and Dr. Mengele. Here experiments that had nothing to do with the tre atment of
diseases were carried out, such as changing the color of the eyes in the attempt of the Germans to
impose blue as the color of the eyes of the upper race.
Also in the Auschwitz camp, I saw the house of Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss, the
commander of the Auschwitz extermination camp, who ordered to kill over one million
prisoners. The guide told us that he loved the place where he lived with his family, although only

22
a few yards from his residence people were tortured and killed by all possible meth ods. He was
killed by gangs following a decision of the Supreme National Court, which was held in Krakow.
He also judged forty people involved in the Auschwitz atrocities and charged with war crimes.
Of these, twenty -three received the death penalty, also by hanging, and the remaining seventeen
received various detention periods, the lowest being three years.
After the end of these exhibitions through the barracks in the camp, the tour continued to
the side where the crematories and gas chambers were bui lt. The guide told us that the Z yklon B
pills were thrown here, and the gas flowing through the shower tubes killed those who were
inside. Then, their corpses reached four incinerators.
The second part of the museum is represented by Auschwitz II – Birkenau w hich was the
real extermination camp, where about 1.6 million men, women and children were found dead:
Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and other nationalities. Birkenau was the largest of the camps that
formed the Auschwitz complex. It began operating in 1942 as a prison for prisoners of war. But
later it also functioned as a center of extermination, especially of the Jews. Towards the end of
the war, from the beginning of 1944, Birkenau became the place where prisoners were
concentrated to be sent to work in Germ an industry. At Birkenau died about 90% of the victims
of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Nine of the ten victims were Jews. The two camps,
united under the name of the Auschwitz -Birkenau camp in Poland, are the largest Nazi camp in
the two world wars . Today it forms the Museum “Auschwitz concentration camp”.
The second extermination camp Auschwitz II – Birkenau was built on the territory of the
village Brzezinka, a name that in Polish has the meaning “birch forest” , probably given by the
birch fores ts near this area. It is a few kilometers from the first. At the entrance of the Ausc hwitz
II – Birkenau camp, a gate is called The Gate of Death, appearing on all the guides and all the
materials related to the description of this camp.
Auschwitz II Birk enau camp was set up at the request of SS Heinrich Himmler who was
the head of all concentration camps who made this decision because the “processing capacity” of
the Auschwitz I was too small and insufficient for the Nazi demands. The size of the Auschwitz
II – Birkenau concentration camp was 140 hectares ; eight of the Polish villages were built on the
face of the earth to be built – and contained over 300 buil dings. It reached a capacity of 200,000
prisoners.

23
It was a real cycle that the Nazis implemented, ultimately getting to extermination. Once
the wagons with prisoners entered the camp, the people inside had no escape. Many of the
prisoners died directly in the wagons through which they arrived at the camp because the road
was very long, and the lack of water and food killed the weak. On the platform where the trains
were running, sorting was done in the place called Judenrampe . Thus, women were separated ,
men were separated and the rest were the elderly, the sick and the children. The last category was
usually sent directly to the gas chamber because it was a category that could not produce
anything.
Prisoners knew only that they were going to take a shower and then prepare them for the
camp life. They were only told to strip naked to make a shower, to be clean, and when they got
out of the showers to know exactly where they left their clothes, they would not mess up with the
others. To distract them before going to the shower, they were also told to think exactly what
qualifications they have, because they will be interviewed by a representative of the Nazis when
they leave the showers and will be assigned according to the qualifications of each. In the show er
rooms, they all died in awful sorrow.
It was very difficult to escape from the camp because the entire perimeter was surrounded
by an electrified barbed wire fence. Here are also the ruins of the former crematoria II and III,
two of the four crematorie s in this camp, where, in 1965, a monument commemorating the
victims of the Holocaustwas built among their ruins. Granite slabs are covered with metal in each
tongue of the states that had prisoners killed in this camp. There is also a plate in Romanian:
“Strigăt de deznădejde și avertisment pentru omenire să fie pururi acest loc în care hitleristii au
ucis aproape un milion și jumătate de femei, bărbați și copii, în principal evrei, din diferite țări
europene.” (“Shout for disdain and warning for mankind to be this place where Nazis killed
nearly a million and a half women, men and children, mainly Jews, from different European
countries.”)
In another part of the campus complex, in the huge display windows the belongings of
those who have found the end be tween the barbed wire fences guarded by the Nazis are kept .
Piles of thousands of pairs of shoes, from the smallest to the largest, thousands of personal
belongings of the deported, from pots to shoe boxes, glasses, suitcases and prostheses, all testify
between the walls, the museum explaining once again that regardless of the social position of
each or the level of intelligence, the death sentence was already given. If you visit Auschwitz

24
you will definitely be impressed with what you will be told when you arrive at the famous and
also the terrible “Block 11” , which was a prison within the camp. There were punished prisoners
who were in trouble or trying to escape, the punishment that eventually turned to death. In a one
meter square cell, no windows or ventilation were crowded with no less than eight detainees who
could only stand and the rats were throwing among them. Most of the time, their escape was
death, suffocation or starvation. There have been detainees who have become prisoners in this
cell jus t because they have been allowed to eat some corn grains found in the feces of the
animals in the camp.
Almost at the end of the visit to Auschwitz, you will reach the famous showers of death,
where most of the people in the camp have been lying about ins ide, but they were actually locked
in the rooms and gassed; around 4 -500 people at once, with Zyklon B granules, initially used in
agriculture, but which the Nazis adapted so as to kill hundreds of people in about twenty
minutes. After being killed, other detainees dealt with the mowing of the corpses, for their hair
was used to tighten up the Nazi uniforms, and then th ey were sent to the crematoria . The guide
will tell you how some of their ashes were sold to farmers for use as fertilizer. The first part o f
the visit, the one in the Auschwitz complex, takes about three hours, and in the second part you
will be transported by a bus approximately three kilometers away, where the Birkenau camp is
located. Lying on a much larger area, the detainees were living the real nightmare of their
deportation.
Dozens of barracks, mostly wooden, are spread in an area where the wind blows strongly
even in summer, barracks set on either side of the railroad, where the deportees were brought to
death. The humiliations and pa ins that the imprisoned men ha d to endure here are hard to
imagine, being locked in some former stables built to accommodate up to 200 animals, over 700
people. Because the number of those who had to be eliminated by the Nazis was still growing,
and the tr ains of death wer e constantly coming, they were “housed” in overlapping beds of
planks. Those who arrived here in just a few weeks became real shadows because of starvation
and illness. In order for the space to be used as efficiently as possible, the beds have been
inclined in V -shape, so that the number of people sleeping in one bed is as large as possible. In
these bays, the wind was blowing the same way as outside and the rain was pouring among the
rare shingles of the barracks. Those who slept in the u pper beds had to withstand the cold and the

25
drops of rain or even the snow that came through the roof, and those who slept in the beds
beneath them were endured more terrible things.
Detainees had only a few seconds to use the toilet in the morning in two hundred holes
made in concrete, located just a few centimeters apart, and their feces were cleansed later by
other detainees, which, surprisingly, were among the lucky ones, because they were not working
in a cold place. Whether or not they lived to live these torments, their final destination was all the
gas cha mbers, and then the crematoria , of which only a few ruins remained, as they were thrown
into the air before the Soviets arrived there. It is said that some bricks in these gas chambers are
still se eing scratches made with nails by those who were gassed inside.
Those people were taken whatever they had in their small luggage, absolutely everything,
as they were meant to remain normal human beings. They soon lost their identity, dehumanized.
Today, i n the showcases, these persona l belongings stand as testimony. You can see there piles
of gathered hair who knows from thousa nds of people, especially women. You get easily
impressed with enormous objects such as shaving devices and the memory used for the beard.
You can see tears, sticks, crutches or leg prostheses, glasses, clothing, footwear, shabby shirts,
and more. All these things once belonged to those poor victims. It cannot be that at their sight,
when only a window separates you from those cruel t estimonies of those years of dread. All
these visual elements provoke a huge disgust and indignation without boundaries for those
abominable acts of the Nazis. People who have been there claim tha t once you visit this place
one cannot shut his eyes for a f ew moments without returning to those times, without expressing
solidarity with those people who have died so bestially and, of course, when one is there, he
turns to positive human feelings like wisdom, kindness, compassion, and love for the entire
humani ty, for all human beings. For the survivors, i n that place, in Auschwitz, those feelings
were left at the edge between reason and illogic and gone beyond any imagination of humanity.
At the beginning of 1945, seeing that they had lost the war, the Nazi le aders of the camps
tried to remove the traces of these massacres and mass murders. So many barracks were burned
and those built of brick were bombed. Also, many documents have been burned. Because the
Soviet army advanced faster than the Nazis expected, mu ch of the Auschwitz camp was left
undisturbed by the Germans. Thus, 39 enclosures have resisted the tendencies of destruction by
SS, and today they are the most real testimony to the tragedy of those places and times. I think
the remaining prisoners, who w ere saved at the arrival of the Soviet troops, felt they were born

26
again. God gave them a new chance to live, remaining the living witnesses of the crimes and
atrocities committed by the Nazis in that camp. In 1947, the Polish Parliament decided to turn th e
concentration camp Auschwitz -Birkenau into a museum.
Walking along the camp’s alleys, “decorated” on the other side with red brick buildings,
called suggestive blocks num bered and each named after the “function” it held, then you jump on
the greenery th at was so green and felt alive among them. True, well -groomed lawns invigorated
that sad place. The numbness of your soul easily begins to pass and you realize that you would
remember this day for a long time. You watch the huge panels with real pictures from each block
where explanations were written, in fact there are written authentic files in the history of the
camp. However, the shadow of terror and death still persists in alleys and buildings on cold and
gray corridors. The presence of the crematoriu m and the furnaces, the sorting barracks, and the
gas chambers, the impregnable electrified wire wall, do not allow us to forget what happened in
Auschwitz and compel us to constantly recall the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. In
those places , there are often moments of silence. It is not just a sign respect, but you can still hear
the deaf terror and the silence before the end.
In 1979, UNESCO declared the Auschwitz camps as part of the universal cultural
heritage of mankind, for such crimes to rem ain alive in the memory of future generations, and
the victims of atrocities and Nazi terror to never be forgotten. In January this year, 70 years have
been commemorated since the Soviet troops released the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The confessions of those who have been there put Auschwitz on a different Level. A
rabbi explains that “t he moment you leave the death camp, you feel an immense release ”; your
“heartis broken and you realized how free and happy you are ”, “away from those times of terror
and horror ”. He is convinced that the visit to the camp has about the same effect for everyone
who loves and respects man and his life and wants a true encounter with history. He claims it is
worthwhile to experience such an experience, even if it will leave you a bitter and sad feeling for
your whole life when you think there. Auschwitz is an extremely important tab in the history of
humanity, a place that existed and left “deep traces and unforgettable memories ” in the collective
mentality of mankind. “It is for these reasons that I think each of us should visit and then
meditate just like Elizabeth Svoboda states that those real museums are those with incorporate
design or content elements that leave visitors unsettled.”

27
You read the ranks and somehow the mind refuses to think. But it was a collective mind
that led humanity to such a crime, a crime that words cannot describe. Very close to the ruins of
one of the five crematories that were destroyed before the end of the war is a memorial in which
a message is written in over twenty languages on large marble slabs. In Romanian, the message
sounds like, “Shouted by the distaste and warning for mankind to be this place where the Nazis
killed almost a million and a half women, men and children, mainly Jews, f rom different
European countries.” And the user ended with the message present in many inscriptions along
the visit and in many books about Auschwitz: You need to know as much as possible about the
horrors of Auschwitz, so that they will never be repeated any more:
Ask monument designers and stewards why Holocaust commemoration is significant, and you get a
stream of straight forward and eminently practical answers: Memorials provide spaces for people to
contemplate and question near -incomprehensible events; they are places of worship and mourning
for those who have lost family members or friends; they provide a context in which survivors can
feel comfortable revealing long -concealed truths about aspects of t heir experiences to their loved
ones.13
It has to be said that, being a very special museum, at the exit there is no shop with
typical souvenirs. There are books, illustrated and DVDs, everything is dominated by decen cy,
just like the café where tourists can end their tour of the former camp. Ausch witz is now a
pilgrimage place for people in Israel, Europe and the rest of the world. Groups of young people
come here to find out about the “final solution” and how far it has gone. Additionally, annual
guarantors or people who have had decision -making p owers are sent to court, if many of them
are over 90 years of age. Last year, the oldest Auschwitz survivor, 108, died, and in 15 -20 years
no horror witness will be alive. Some survivors visit the museum and lecture, write books that
have enjoyed great pop ularity and do their best to warn that such g enocide should not happen
again:
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the
tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered,
when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever
men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must —
at that moment —become the center of the universe .14

13Elizabeth Zvoboda, “Never Forget Never Again,” Science Spirit (2006): 42.
14 Elie Wiesel, Night , 118.

28
The conquest of the Auschwitz camp and the release of detainees by the Soviet army
ended this monstrosity. The soldiers themselves woke up in front of an incredible reality. A
reality no one could imagine. A reality also encountered in conquering other camps and releasing
other detainees by allied troops, including the Dachau camp, by the US military. As for the Jews,
they were destined for death by the very fact that they were born without any other guilt.
The camps were conquered, unlocked, the survi ving detainees were released. Some of
them were in such a state that they could not survive after the release. Survivors have struggled
to reintegrate into social, economic and cultural life, some in their countries, others emigrating.
The Auschwitz camp h as been preserved to serve as a museum. The problem was that it was on
the territory of Poland, becoming a communist country. However, it b ecame a museum, and the
slogan “ Arbeit macht frei” remained on the gate in its place as a symbol of cynicism and Nazi
lie. Although marginalized, the museum founded on the territory of the camp remained even
during the anti -Israeli and anti -Semitic policy of the Polish Communist government. Poland,
which had been the center of European Judaism, had become the huge cemete ry of this Judaism.
After the collapse of the communist regime, the museum on the territory of the Auschwitz camp
became a symbol, being visited by people of good faith from all over the world, regardless of
nationality, religion, ethnic origin. Visitors w ere also Muslim Arabs, who thus began to
understand the Jewish tragedy, like many people who have begun to grasp in depth the tragedy
of all mankind, of dehumanization.

29

Destiny, Luck or Ambition? Survivors of Auschwitz

Probably all those people who visited this place called Auschwitz, the concentration
camp of extermination of Nazi Germany, asked themselves: How did God allow such horrors?
How was it possible for the leading representatives of a hardworking and civilized people to
commit such atr ocities? For what reasons were over one million people were killed, mostly Jews .
It can be hard for us to even try to understand how this was possible. We might assume that ordinary
citizens were so terrified of retribution from the vicious Nazi regime that they reluctantly went along
with it. But the truth is far more disturbing than that. In fact, thousands of people, who had lived
side by side with their Jewish neighbours for generations, were quite willing to turn on them and
become part of a program me of mass murder.15
In spite of the emigration of approximately 300,000 German Jews in the years after the
seizure of the Nazis, in Germany there were almost 200,000 Jews at the beginning of World War
II. During the war, the Jews who were in that country, as in all areas of Europe under German
occupation, were depo rted and killed as part of the “final solution” . About the extermination
camp in Auschwitz, in the southern Poland, the final destination of millions of Jews during the
Second World War, many have been said, but there are certainly stories still waiting to be found.
One of the survivors of Auschwitz is Irina Berenstein. At the age of eighty -six, Irina, a
former luxury seamstress, spurred memories that the paper sheet barely endured. She saw her
grandparents, her father and the woman who was with him and some of the brothers taken to the
crematori a. Eleven loved ones lost at the Auschwitz camp, including six brothers with ages
between ten and seventeen. The woman recalls her story as though all the m isfortunes had
happened yesterday:
In the camp , the cremations were burning after each transport with the Jews. It smelled like flesh
and I knew what was going on. There were then trials for work, and we prayed that Doctor Mengele
would not be present, wh o liked to kill and experiment with the Jews. I was sleeping on the empty

15Marian Gheorghe, “M ărturii din Infernul de la Auschwitz”, Historia : 3.
https://www.historia.ro/sectiune/general/articol/marturii -din-infernul -de-la-auschwitz accessed June 20 , 2017.

30
ground, we washed with soap made from the fat of those killed, and while eating we ate grass in it. I
had drowned myself in a heavy silence. They were passing daily in front of the b arracks of shadows,
people who took the road of death.16
While Irina was on the train to Nurnberg, she started singing a Romanian romance , a song which
was very famous at that time. Sh e was heard by the German who guarded the Jews from the
adjoining wagon, and at the first stop he told the soldier in her wagon to make an exchange, that
is, to take her to his wagon instead of another Jew. She then found out that he was a Romanian,
Sax, and that he had arrived in the Wehrmacht because he had b een promised land, being poor.
Enchanted by Irina’s voice, the Saxon divided his ration with her an d cared for her t o the
destination. She never saw him again.17
Other survivors are Waclaw Sobczak and Karol Czekalski , detainees who live today
defying the diabolic plan of a leader who took away their freedom and their integrity . While they
were in the camp they wanted to leave a proof of their sufferings. Their names, the places where
they came from, and the numbers of the detainees were placed on a pebbled piece of paper
ripped off a cement bag. At that time , they were young, they were between eighteen and twenty
years old.
The message with the data of the seven detainees – six Poles and a French Jew – was
recently discovered by a team of Polish workers who were working to consolida te a high school
in Auschwitz. “I wanted to remember you, ” confesses Waclaw Sobczak. “I was only 19 years
old. Life in the camp was horrible. I was living with fear that we could be killed at any tim e for
no reason. We thought we would never get out of that hell. One of us wrote the names, localities
and numbers of detainees on a piece of paper. I then built the message bottle in a wall. We
wanted to leave something behind,” says the old man who now lives in the Polish city of L odz
with his wife and daughter.
Another survivor, Karol Czekalski, was concentrated in Auschwitz in 1943 with his
brother and his parents. Under his eyes, the German soldiers killed his father, and soon his
mother was gassed.18

16Marian Gheorghe, “M ărturii din Infernul de la Auschwitz”, 5.
17 Marian Gheorghe, “M ărturii din Infernul de la Auschwitz”, 5.
18 “Au g ăsit un bilet scris acum 65 de ani în fabrica mor ții”, Libertatea , (2009):5. http://www.libertatea.ro/stiri/stiri –
externe/au -gasit -un-bilet-scris-acum -65-de-ani-in-fabrica -mortii -342820 last accessed June 20 , 2017.

31
Elie Wiesel, a human rights activist and writer, named the “ messenger for humanity” and
distinguished with the Nobel Prize for peace , remains in history thanks to the way he presented
his experience in Nazi concentration camps, but also due to hi s conciliation and humanism . Eva
Mozes Kor, who has survived the Holocaust ’s horror, sends an emotional message after Elie
Wiesel’s death. The woman, who was born in Romania, remembers t he meetings with the so –
called “messenger for humanity” and praises the role he has had for the stories of those who
survived the Nazis to be heard .
He and I were born in Romania, born in Sighet, not far from Portz, my birthplace. In 1984 we met at
the synagogue in Cluj, the city where I lived after the war. A t that syn agogue, I and Miriam (Eva
Mozes’ s sister, also surviving the Holocaust) participated in our first Holocaust memorial cer emony
in 1946 or 19 47. I first talked to Elie Wiesel on the phone in 1981 and met him at Auschwitz in
1985, during the 40th an niversary of his release. Then we met several times over the years19
She believes Elie Wiesel has helped a lot for the horrors of the Holoc aust to be known in the
world. “ He was helped by hundreds – even thousands of Holocaust survivors who have told their
own stories so that we can understand this huge mosaic in million s of people have been
affected,”20 says Eva Mozes. Elie Wiesel’ s greatest accomplishment, she wrote, was that she had
the talent to get in touch with many political leaders who used their infl uence to create a
Holocaust Memorial Council in the United States, and later the Museum Memorial of the
Holocaust. Surely, Eva Mozes points out, the museum is a huge help so that the Holocaust drama
is not forgotten and the memories of the victims remain a live.
Paulina Vasile was another lucky human being . She is one of the su rvivors of the Roma
Holocaust. She is 80 years old and she bears some terrible memories from a Transnistrian camp
in which she arrived in 1942 when she was eleven years old and had only a cloth cloth on her
body.
They led us to death. They led us to die , like the shoes, from our feet , says Paulina Vasile. They
came one morning and t ook us in the cars like cattle, says Paulina Vasile. I was eleven years old
when we were all gathered in a stable in Poroschia. Thousands and thousands of people were there,

19Diana Robu, “O româncă supraviețuitoare povestește întâlnirea cu Elie Wiesel”, Ziare.com (2016): 2.
http://www.ziare.com/știri/morți/o -româncă -supraviețuitoare -a-holocaustului -povestește -întâlnirea -cu-elie-wiesel –
14279 35 last accessed June 29, 2017.
20 Diana Robu, “O româncă supraviețuitoare povestește întâlnirea cu Elie Wiesel”, 2.

32
all kinds of nations. And that is where we got on the train,’ says the old woman who is one of the
few survivors of the Roma Holocaust.21
She recounts that during the trip they received onl y black bread and canned food. “ We kicked
them in order to undo them because they did not give us anything,” the survivor says. The road
was one without stops, and all those in wagons had to give up any form of intimacy. They
improvised a toilet by making a hole in the wagon floor. The same wagon as they were sleepi ng,
eating and traveling. That is how they lived for two weeks until the train ar rived at destination –
Odessa. “ I went crazy. We realized we were at a loss. From Odess a he took us to the camp,” says
Vasile Paulina. “ The camp was with a barbed wire all over, and there were different rooms . And
they put everyone in there, the woman describes t he moment of the human triage. ”“There w ere
long chambe rs in that camp , but before that we had to go through the triage ,”the woman says.22
Over the years, Paulina has told her the experience she has been through to anyone who
wanted to hear. “ Maybe someone wants to hear and learn,” says the woman who survived the
Holocaust. Her story is now caught in a book, Why don’t they cry? The Holocaust of the Roma
and Its True Story23, written by Adrian Nicolae Furtuna, Delia Grigore and Mihai Neacsu. The
work is a collective testimony of twent y-eight Holocaust survivors. Paulina did not forget the
experience of Transnistria and says she does not regret being a Gypsy. According to Adrian –
Nicolae Furtuna, there are no exact figures about the Roma who were deporte d to Transnistria.
Many died there because of typhus, hunger, cold, because many of them lived under the open
sky.
An important source of information about the victims of the Holocaust is represented by
the United States Holocaust Museum24.There one can discover precious information about
“displaced, persecuted, or discriminated” survivors. The Museum’s Behind Every Name a Story
project “ gives voice to the experiences of survivors” during the Holocaust.
Ivor Pearl is a boy who was arrested in 1944, after the Germans occupied Hungary, who
had tried to cross the Allied side. He and his parents and eight brothers were originally sent to
Auschwitz, where women and children were s eparated from men and killed. H e escaped from

21 See https://marturiiholocaus t.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/povestea -paulinei -vasile -2/#more -89 last accessed May
15, 2017.
22 See https://marturiiholocaust.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/ povestea -paulinei -vasile -2/#more -89.
23 Adrian Nicolae Furtuna and Mihai Neacsu, De ce nu plâng? (București: Editura Centrul Rromilor, 2014) 27.
24 See “Survivors and Victims” https://www.ushmm.org/remember/the -holocaust -survivors -and-victims -resource –
center/survivors -and-victims accessed June 20 , 2017.

33
death because of his mother, who forced him to leave her and go men. His mother and seven of
the eight brothers died in the concentration camp. In February 1945, Ivor Perl, thirteen years old,
was in the snow, desperate and hungry and aware that under normal circ umstances it would have
been time for his bar mitzvah . But instead of celebrating, Ivor watched through the fe nce of
concentration camp , where he had been sent to work, only with thin prison clothes to protect him
from the cold winter and a slice of bread a day to quench his hunger.25
“The camp was in the middle of a forest, and the fence was passing through the trees. I prayed to
God to save me and I promised that I will never ask for anything, if I can help to get out of
there, ” recalls Ivor, who is now eighty -one years old. Only released when the American soldiers
entered Germany and, to their horror, found the cam ps where Ivor and millions as him were held
in harsh conditions . In addition to the malnutrition and the cold that s truck him and the fatigue
caused by work, Ivor also suffered from typhus. The Nazi regime affected him very much, and
he had to lie about the age he had, not to be useless and most likely killed. The boy said he was
sixteen years old and was used by the Ge rmans, being considered fit and sent to the
concentration camp, but that meant that Ivor, a thirteen -year-old boy, had to work as much as an
adult.26
When he first got off the train, he ran to the group where his mother was, saying he
wanted to stay with he r, but she did not even want to hear and forced him to join the other group:
“I have seen a N azi white -collar officer who guided the prisoners to the left or to the right. Later
I learned that the man was Dr. Josef Mengele. When he got to my side, he stopp ed and wondered
how old I was. I remembered what I had learned and told him I was sixteen years old. I still
remember his gaze as he thought about where to send me. To my luck, I was big enough for my
age, so she probably thought I could work, no matter ho w old I was. And if I could not cope,
well …” recalls Ivor.27
His strength and endurance would be tested wit h a peak and sprinkled during the winter.
An ordinary meal consisted of a slice of bread, a cup of hot water and sometimes little
margarine, and th e only clothing that protected him from the cold of winter was the famous

25 See “Iarna în lagărul de concentrare” Mediafax.ro , (2013), 2.
http://www.medi afax.ro/life -inedit/iarna -in-lagarul -de-concentrare -marturia -unui-supravietuitor -al-holocaustului –
promiteam -ca-nu-voi-mai-cere-nimic -niciodata -daca-ma-ajuta -sa-ies-de-acolo -11824950 last accessed June 19 ,
2017.
26 “Iarna în lagărul de concentrare”, 2.
27 “Iarna în lagărul de concentrare”, 2.

34
white and black stripes and sometimes a thin cotton coat. Along with other detainees, Ivor was
commissioned to work on extraordinary projects, such as underground storage facilities for
weapons, using only rudimentary equipment.
The order was maintained by a combination of extreme fear and force. When a prisoner
hid in a cave to avoid work, the guards chose to throw some grenades in, instead of waiting for
him to come out, the boy rem embers. In the morning, all prisoners had to choose what project
they want ed to work, an agonizing decision, some works being light, while others were causing
the death of many workers. One day, Ivor chose differently from his brother. The latter was sent
to a farm, where he had the opportunity to eat for three weeks, while Ivor weakened so much that
his brother almost no longer recognized him.28
No on e suffered more harshly from the unthinkable evils elaborated by Hitler and his
despicable regime. The Jews suffered the first attack of the Nazis against the city of freedom and
human dignity. They endured and continued to endure a burden that exceeded the limits of
suffering. They were not allow ed him to curtail their spirit; they have never lost their will to
resist resistance. Undoubtedly, on the day of victory, the suffering of the Jew s and their part in
the battle will not be forgotten.
The invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939 also ended the happy childhood of Henia
Bryer. On the occasion of the Internat ional Holocaust Remembrance Day, she told the BBC team
how she was captured by the invading Germans and how she survived after crossing four Nazi
concentration camps. “They wore black uniforms with a skull on their caps and installed loud
speakers all over the cit y to call their propaganda,” recalls Henia about the arrival of the German
army in Radom, Poland. “Hitler’ s speeches kept hours and hours … there was nothing secret
abou t what he would do to the Jews.” At first, the Bryer family survived because of the gold
coins saved by the father, former shoe factory owner. But they would have endured much more,
says the BBC commentator . In 1941, they were among the 30,000 people who were imprisoned
in the ghettos organized in the Jewish areas. The conditions w ere terrible: 10 people lived in a
single room. Violence and firefights were the order of the day, but the family managed to remain
united.29

28 “Iarna în lagărul de concentrare ”, 2.
29 Ana Stan, “Nimic nu secompară cu Holocaustul”, International , (2013): 2.
http://adevarul.ro/international/europa/nimic -nu-compara -holocaustul -povestea -supravietuitoare -trecut -patru -lagare –
concentrare -1_5103f683aa73e8e04b46c721/index.html accessed 7 June, 2017.

35
“My young er brother was taken to the guns factory. I did not know what happened to him during
the wa r and he did no t talk about it,” Henia confesses to the BBC. Her older brother, who had
been suffering from a disability since birth, was among those killed. “ My brother went to the
hospital, but everyone wh o had disabilities was killed. H e knew exactly what was happenin g. He
took off his coat and ga ve it to his mother, telling her to give it to someone who needed it, that he
would not need a winter coat. My mother returned home with her coat in her hand. “30
In 1944, she was sent to Auschwitz -Birkenau, where she saw the famous doctor of the
camp, Josef Mengele. “ They took us off the train and we had to strip ourselves. Men were
separated from women. And there stood Dr. Mengele and his subordinates , completely dressed in
uniforms, and we had to pass in front of them. You imagine how we felt. Everything was on his
finger: a small sign to your left and you reached the crematorium, sign to the r ight and you
reached the camp, “ says Bryer. She also remembers the music that screamed in the speakers
while the children were separa ted from their parents. She did not see her sister, but she has no
doubt as to what happened: “She was sent to the ovens.” During a terrible winter, Bryer, now a
prisoner tattooed with A26188, fought not to starve and she recite d poems to think of somethin g
else. “ I always repeat ed that I was too young to die. I h ave not achieved anything yet.” Sh e was
barely eighteen years old. Three months after arriving at Auschwitz and just two days before the
Russian troops arrived there, she was moved again to another concentration camp . When she
arrived at Bergen -Belsen, she saw a huge mountain of decaying bodies. The camp was awful ,
even when compared to Auschwitz.31
After the war, Henia reunited with her mother and lived for a while in France and Israel
before meeti ng her husband Maurice and moving together in South Africa. Now, at the age of
80, they are afraid that the young generation know s nothing about the Holocaust. “I did a surgery
earlier and the anesthesiologist came in and saw my tattoo on my arm. She asked me what it was
and I told her I got it from Auschwitz. “Auschwitz? What’ s tha t?” sh e asked. And she was a
young woman, a doctor,” says Henia. Henie Bryer’ s memories of the camps she was in and the
scenes she witnes sed are still present, and she is determ ined not to let anyone forget. “ In our

30 Ana Stan, “Nimic nu se compară cu Holocaustul”, 2.
31 Ana Stan, “Nimic nu se compară cu Holocaustul”, 2.

36
history of men, we have had wars and bloody revolutions and all sorts of tragedies, but I think
that (Holocaust, n.r. ) does not compare to anything,” she concludes her story for the BBC.32
Annelies Marie Frank (1929 -1945) was a German Jew, arrested and deported with the
last transport to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus. While she hid in Amsterdam, she wrote a
diary that is a historical Holocaust document.
Anne Frank’ s tragic ovation is well -known. Together with her family and other well -known
Jews, Anne hid for two years (July 6th, 1942 -4, 1944), for fear of being deport ed to the camp, in
the so -called Attachment of her father’ s patronage, in Amsterdam occupied by German y. Sh e
was thirteen when she entered the Annex. She kept a diary (previously started on June 12th,
1942), becoming at some point aware that she would be an important document after the war
would be over. On August 4, 1944, not long after the Allied landing in Normandy, when the end
of the harassment se emed very close, Anne and the other seven apprentices were arrested and
later deported with the last transport to Auschwitz. With the exception of Otto Frank, everyone
would die. Anne and her sister would die of typhus at Bergen -Belsen in February or March 1945.
Release d from the Auschwitz camp, Anne’ s father will publ ish and make known his daughter’ s
diary all over the world.
Anne Frank is a familiar name even for those who have not read the diary . Her name was
chosen for streets, schools on all the merid ians. The Museum of Amsterdam and the foundation
that organized it in the building where the Secret Annex is located are well -known .
Anne Frank and her diary featured on all the excellence lists of the twentieth centur y on
personalities and books, t he most important people of the century, t he best books published in
the tw entieth century d efining literary works for the same century .
Since 1947, when it was first published in the Netherlands, Anne Frank’ s diary has been
translated into more than sixty -five languages. It has sold around 30 million copies worldwide.
The diary’s celebrity has undoubtedly contributed to many theatrical and cinematic adaptations,
becoming study subjects in many schools around the world, subject to subtle analyzes, and the
target o f vehement attacks. If we take a look at the pages of her diary, we discover that s he is still
hopeful in those terrifying moment :
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they
can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it

32 Ana Stan, “Nimic nu se compară cu Holocaustul”, 2.

37
should be and that God wishes to see people happy, ami dst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as
this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every
sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all
troubles.33
Frank was born on 12 June 1929 in Frankfurt as daughter of Edith (Holländer) and Otto
Frank. The Frank family of Jewish origin also had a girl, Margot , born in 1926. After Hitler’ s
coming into power and the anti -Semitic per secution, Otto Frank decided to emig rate with his
family to the Netherlands in Amsterdam where he had relations Business. Beginning with June
12, 1942, the diary, which she called Kit ty, became Anna’ s best friend.
Otto Frank and Edith Frank had two daughters: Anna and Margot, three years old er. After
the Nazis came to power in Germany, Otto Frank decid ed to open a subsidiary of his “Opekta”
firm in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In May 1940, the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazi
Germany. At first, the Nazis were less aggressive than the Jews in the Netherlands, but this did
not take long. Anti -Semitic laws were decreed one after the other. On June 12, 1942, on the
occasion of her 13th anniversary, Anne received a diary with white -red plaids with a key. In it,
she was confident of an imaginary friend, Kitty, on religion, love and sexuality. Her father
arranged a hiding place in the Prinsengracht dwelling 263, whose entrance was camouflaged by a
library. On August 4, 1944, the Nazis came to the Prinsengracht home after someone had
betrayed them c alling the Gestapo. On September 2, 1944, the Frank family was announced to be
sent to Auschwitz. On September 3, 1944, the last train left for Auschwitz, filled with over 1,000
Jews.
Anne was fifteen years old three months before arriving in Auschwitz, es caping an
immediate death because 549 passengers, including all those under the age of fifteen , were sent
directly to the gas chambers. Anne, Margot, and Edith Frank were sent to block 29 of the
Birkenau women’ s camp, where they stayed until October 28, 19 44, when they were transferred
to the Bergen -Belsen concentration camp. In March 1945, a typhus epidemic broke out in the
camp, killing thousands of prisoners. Among the victims were Anne and Margot. On April 15,
1945, the troops released th e concentration camp .
Otto Fran k was the only survivor of them who hid in Prinsengracht 263. Subseque ntly, he
published his daughter’ s diary. Here are some snipp ets of the diary: “I put in the bag the most
absurd thing s.”, “ Margot and I started packing the necessary stuff into our school bags. The first

33 Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl , (London: Penguin, 2003), 23.

38
thing I got was this carton, then curls, handkerchiefs, handbags, combs, old letters; t hinking that
we are going to hide, we put in the bag the most absurd things, but I do no t regret, because they
keep mo re on memories than on dresses”(July 8, 1942). “ I am pushing more than I can say that
we can never go out and I am very afraid we wi ll be discovered and then shot. Of course , this is
not a very pleasant perspective .” (Septembe r 28, 1942). “ Our hiding place has now become a
hiding place in the true sense of the word. Mr. Kugler considered it better to put a library in front
of the entrance door (because there are many perks for discovering hidden bikes), of course a
turn-up libr ary that opens like a door.” (August 21, 1942).34
Anne Frank’s family hid for two years, for fear of deportation to a camp, in an
Amsterdam -occupied German building. The young writer recorded in her diary the events of that
period. The d efinitive version of Anne Frank’ s Diary appeared in the Romanian translation
ofGheorghe Nicolaescu at Humanitas Publi shing House in 2011. The manuscript is located in the
Amsterdam Memorial House and is included in the World Heritage Site of UNESCO.
The book was published und er the patronage of the Anne Frank Foundation. As the
single survivor and sole heir of his daughter Anne, Otto H. Frank founded the Anne Frank
Foundation (AFF) in Basel, Switzerland, in 1963, being designat ed as her legal representative.
Together with her family and other well -known Jews, Anne stood for two years (July 6, 1942 -4,
1944), for fear of deportation to the camp, in the so -called Attachment of the father -owned firm,
in Amsterdam occupied by German. Sinc e 1947, when it was first published in the Netherlands,
“Anne Frank’s Diary ” has been translated into more than 65 languages. More than 30 million
copies have been sold worldwide. People are impressed by her natural and sincere writing and by
the maturity of her thinking, even though she was very young:
“Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts
of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and
commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people
look upon women too as soldiers?…Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation
of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed
freedom -fighting heroes put together!” 35

34 Mariana Iancu, “Jurnalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, Adevărul.ro (2006): 3.
http://adevarul.ro/locale/constanta/jurnalul -emotionant -annei -frank -murit-tifos-lagar -mi-e-foarte -teama -vom-
descoperiti -apoi-impuscati -1_5809db115ab6550cb8c45770/index.html accessed June 10, 2017.
35 Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, 25.

39
Nanette Blitz Konig was a friend of Anne Frank, the author who included in her diary the
life hidd en from the eyes of the Nazis. Anne Frank’s Diary was published in many languages,
thus sharing with th e world the difficult condition of the millions of Jews during the Holocaust,
presented through the eyes of a teenager.
“I wonder today how we succeeded, two skeleton s, to recognize one another …” Nanette
Blitz Konig is 83 years old and talks about the last time she saw his camp colleague, Anne Frank.
It was March 12, 1945, and the young Anne would die less than two weeks from that date.36
Nanette’ s vivid gaze betrays horror under the sign of rememb rance. However, she is ready to
reveal her archive and personal history in her home in São Pao, where she lived since 1950.
Daughter of a director of the Amsterdam Bank, Nanette studied at the Jewish High School,
where she was in the same class as Anne. She recalls about Anne:
“Anne was a living girl, who loved to talk and liked people!” Says Blitz Konig with a
glimpse into h is eyes. “If she still lived, I a m sure she’d become an extraordinary writer. ”37
Nanette knew about the diary the young man kept. It wa s published by the father of the
author, Otto, after the war ended. Anne had received the book on her 13th anniversary on June
12, 1942, and Nanette was also present at the party. Just after the anniversary, the two girls were
separated – Anne hid wi th her family behind her father’ s office, while Nanette, along with her
family, was arrested. They reunited in 1944 at the Bergen -Belsen concentration camp, 300
kilometers from Berlin, Germany : “When I could see her in the camp, Anne told me about her
diary, say ing she was going to use it as a starting point for the book she wanted to write about
her experience, ” Nanette added.38
Both girls became infected with typhoid fever while they were prisoners. Nanette
survived, Anne did not: “ When I saw her the last time she was very weak, dry and had a blanket
on her because she could not bear licked clothes. She cou ld hardly recognize me or talk.” From
her experience in the concentratio n camp, Nanette remembers that “ people hoped … Everybody
hoped to survive and everyo ne was fighting for it. I was terrified that I did not know what was
going to happen next .”39

36Mariana Iancu, “Jurnalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, 3.
37 Mariana Iancu, “Jurnalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, 3.
38 Mariana Iancu, “Jur nalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, 3.
39 Mariana Iancu, “Jurnalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, 3.

40
She also recalled the calls: “ They were forcing us to stand even for 36 hours. During these calls,
the Nazis could pu ll out anybody out of the line.” When they pul led me out I started t o shake
because I did not know w hat was going to hap pen to me. “ I was lucky – the officer shot a sign of
fire and sent me back in a row w ithout torturing or killing me. It was a mere coincidence that I
did not die then. ”40
Nanette nev er returned to the camp, but she remembers perfectly the day she was
relea sed. “ It was April 13, 1945. The Nazis who were overseeing the camp had left, and the
English reached 15. For two days, we, the prisoners, lived in lethargy, if the troops would not
come, we could not have gone anywhere alone . When I was finally released, so meone told me
“you survived.” I felt completely lost. ”41
Nanette was the only surviving family member weighing only 32 kilograms . Seventy
years later, she revealed its pas t for others to learn from it. Sh e regularly visits sc hools in São
Paolo and tells her students about what happened during the Holocaust. “ The fact that I have
survived must be a testimony in order for young people to be properly informed, but especially
for som ething like the Holocaust to never be repeated,” she says.42
A former Nazi guard at Auschwitz, now being tried in Germany for genocide complicity,
has made some tremendous statements in front of the magistrates. The former SS guard said that
so many trains with Jews arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp, so they often had to wait
with the doors shut until the first train was selected .43
Most of those trapped in the trains were killed in the gas chambers immediately, 93 -year-
old Oskar Groning, known as the “ Ausch witz accountant,” remembers. He made the statements
on Wednesday on the second day of his trial in Germany, where he was tried for complicity in
killing at least 300,000 Jews in the Polish camp. On the first day Tuesday, Groning said his role
in Auschwitz was to count the confiscated money from the newly -arrived detainees and
confessed to assisting in mass murders, but denied he was directly involved in g enocide and was
guilty of the “ moral ”, but not “legal ” part. Oskar Groning said he was often i n charge of
guarding the area where the main gas cham bers were located at Birkenau. “ The capacities of the

40 Mariana Iancu, “Jurnalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, 4.
41 Mariana Iancu, “Jurnalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, 4.
42 Mariana Iancu, “Jurnalul emoționant al Annei Frank”, 4.
43 See “Auschwitz Trials: Oskar Groening recalls ‘queue’ of trains ” http://www.bbc.com/news/world -32419412
accessed May 15 , 2017.

41
gas chambers and the crematorium were rather limited. Some said 5,000 people were killed in 24
hours, but we did not check tha t information. I did no t know,” he told German judges.44
Although the survivors have testified that the arrival at Auschwitz was chaotic and
traumatic, the former SS guard claim ed the procedure was, in fact, “very orderly” and “not at all
tiring” for him. “ Everyone was going, so me in one direction, to each other … to the place where
the gas chambers and crematoria were located,” he said in the courtroom where he was
confronted with several victims who survived the Nazi atrocities. Oskar Groning, who was
threatened to serve up to 15 years in prison, came to the attention of prosecutors after criticizing
those who denied the exist ence of the Holocaust in 2005. “ I saw the gas chambers. I saw the
crematorium. I was there when the selections were mad e (for ga s chambers – n.red.).” He spoke
ten years ago, for the BBC documentary about Auschwitz – the Nazis and the “Final Solution ”.45
Wool Hida was born on September 20, 1922, in a not too hefty Jewish family in Cluj. Her
father was a tailor and fought in the Aus tro-Hungarian army, being seriously injured on the
Russian front. In the spring of 1944 she wa s deported to Auschwitz with her family. Sh e went
through several Nazi camps, but managed to survive, t he only one in her family. After the war ,
she lived for a w hile in Bucharest, in the 1970s she settled in Israel. The transcript of her
memories of the ghetto and her arrival at Auschwitz, as reported to her son George Hida in 1986,
recorded and made available to the rea der some years after Ilana Hida’ s extinction .46
The Nazi concentration camp concentration was based on the destruction of the identity
of each prisoner, the dissolution of humanity and the inter -human relations, the establishment of
a fie rce competition system between the “victims” . Resistance of pr isoners to this policy of
dehumanization is a complex theme: the first level of resistance actually meant keeping human
and solidarity behaviors. Testimonies of survivors show that resistance began with an attempt to
stay alive, maintaining relationships, reaching up to revolt.
In 1943, Buchenwald laid the foundations for an international resistance movement
(ICC), coordinating several Communist prisoners. The ICC Committee was organized in t he
form of national groups and “blocks” (camp barracks), connecti ng communists, socialists, union

44 “Auschwitz Trials: Oskar Groening recalls ‘queue’ of trains” http://www.bbc.com/news/world -32419412
accessed May 15 , 2017.
45See “Survivors and Victims” https://www.ushmm.org/remember/the -holocaust -survivors -and-victims -resource –
center/survivors -and-victims accessed June 20 , 2017.
46See “Survivors and Victims” https://www.ushmm.org/remember/the -holocaust -survivors -and-victims -resource –
center/survivors -and-victims accessed June 20 , 2017.

42
workers – an important role for prisoners who could speak multiple languages. Between 1943
and 1945, they managed to organize two special blocks in which the children were hidden and
protected by the SS guards, to organize an information exchange network between the blocks
and the satellite camps, an illegal infirmary in which Muresan also worked . Those in the
resistance move ment managed to infiltrate the “ prisoners’ administration” (usually in other
camps led by ordinary prisoners) to hide documents, people, supplies, even weapons, preparing
an illegal military organization.47
A book of recent studies published by the Romanian Academy and the Federation of
Jewish Communities in Roman ia contains, besides the studies of several Iasi historians, a chapter
of confessions. One of them belongs to the prof. Ioan Gottlieb of the Al.I.Cuza University of
Physics, a survivor of the Auschwitz, Melk and Mauthausen Nazi camps, the “living exhibit” of
the Holocaust, as he says, with self -irony. His confession from this book is, however, more
complete and tormenting. Here is the way to the camp, and the humiliations, and how he lost his
family, the way home, the cynicism of the Germans, and the humani ty of some of them:
The most tragic episode for me was the loss of my father, the man I loved and most esteemed. (…)
The idea of leaving the living, to avoid suffering, humiliation and impotence, has always pursued
my father. (…) He got two doses of mo rphine in a combination that could be absorbed directly
through his stomach (…) Daddy at Auschwitz had kept them under his arm and managed to save
them. It happened in August, when the two packets watered. Then my dad intended to swallow them
because the re was no way to save them. It was a time when I had the hope that we would escape, the
front approached, the food had improved. (…) so I let the mortal dose break. (…)48
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Romania. He was deported to Auschwitz in
1944, with his whole family, where he would find his mother, his younger sister and his father.
First published in 1958 at Editions de Minuit , Night is the first book signed by Elie Wiesel, the
story of his experience in the Nazi extermination camps (Ausch witz, Birkenau, Buna, Gleiwitz).
The author wrote over fifty fictional and non -fiction works: novels, stories, essays, testimonies,
interviews, constantly advocating human rights and condemning the horrors of the Holocaust. In
1986 he received the Nobel Pe ace Prize, and in 1996 he was appointed member of the American
Academy of Art and Literature. Since 2001 he ha d been an honorary member of the Romanian

47 See “Survivors and Victims” https://www.ushmm.org /remember/the -holocaust -survivors -and-victims -resource –
center/survivors -and-victims accessed June 20 , 2017.
48Emilia Chiscop, “Ioan Gotlieb: Mărturii dureroase de la Auschwitz”, ZiaruldeIasi.ro , (2008): 3.
http://blog.ziaruldeiasi.ro/emilia -chiscop/ioan -gottlieb -marturii -dureroase -de-la-auschwitz/166/ accessed June 10,
2017.

43
Academy, the National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania bearing his name. He
was the d irector of the Jewish Studies Center at the University of Boston.
Translated everywhere in the world, sold in millions of copies and long commented,
Night was, along with Anne Frank’ s diary or Primo Levi’ s memoirs, among the earliest books
describing the m artyrdom of the Jews in the Nazi camps. Testifying to Auschwitz’ s inferno, Elie
Wiesel asks, in the preface of this edition, if there are words capable of por traying the
unimaginable, that “ cold and humble universe in w hich it was human to be inhuman” . But the
attempt must be made not to repeat history, so as not to let the sadness of the past become a
future. Because “forgetting is danger and insult” .49
Elie Wiesel’ s book is recognized as one of the fundamental books of the Holocaust. The
Jewish survivor, born in a city that belongs today to Romaniais now an important person for
Romania’ s history, being the o ne who gave t he name of the National Institute for the Stud y of
the Holocaust in Romania, as a result of the final report o f the International Commission “Elie
Wiesel” of Holocaust Studies in Romania, where the reputed writer and journalist was the
project coordinator.
Night is the description of his own traumas, of his own tragedy from the moment when
World War II reaches Sighet, through the Nazi extermination camps, and to the much -wanted
liberation, burdened by the death of all his family members. Nor are there any problem s after the
Great War, when the book was forbidden in communist countries , people not yet eager to
remember much of what happened in the Nazi Empire, some traumas being left somewhere in
oblivion. Unfortunately, those days passed and his book is edited and re-edited, translated and
read again when we need to remember the great tragedies of humanity.
Elie Wiesel was fifteen and a few months old when he was sent with his family to one of
the Jews trains to the Nazi concentration camps. His testimony is awful , and the survivor over
the years (the book was originally published in 1958, 13 years after his release by the US Army)
is still strongly marked by everything that happened to him. It is also norm al, there are things
that he ha d never been forgotten, thin gs we s hould never forget, but Elie’ s case is even more
eloquent: as soon as he arri ved at Auschwitz , he was separated from his mother a nd his sisters,
whom , he confesses, he would never see again (the two older sisters were discovered in an
orphanage in F rance after the end of the war, and they reunited, bu t the mother and little sister

49 Elie Wiesel, Night , 7.

44
were exterminated in the camp) . He s tayed with his father for a long time until his death to the
end of the war, helping him when he could, but at the same time confessing that he had stayed
away just because he diminished his chances of survival . Liberated, he was in a post -traum atic
state of deep depression, as many othe r Holocaust survivors. And that is when he has often
managed to get into more humane labor detachments (if that can be said), saying he is eighteen
years old and often escaping by luck .
In the beginning of his book he is trying to explain the reasons, for the reader or for
himself, which m ade him write this book: “Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary,
to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that
had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind? ”50 He does not have an ex planation for
his salvation:
I don't know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle?
Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more
deserving than myself? It was nothing mor e than chance. However, having survived, I needed to
give some meaning to my survival. Was it to protect that meaning that I set to paper an experience
in which nothing made any sense?51
This is a question which still ponders in the mind of all the survivor s. How was the selection
made? How could some perish in such short time? They still wonder if they survived because of
their strong ambition, their strong determination to live, or whether it was simply luck.
For survivors, getting back to life as it was b efore the Holocaust was impossible. In much
of Europe there were no longer any Jewish communities. When they tried to return to their
homes from the fields or their hiding places, in many cases they found that their houses had been
looted or taken by other s.
Also, returning home was dangerous. After the war, there were anti -Semitic riots in
several Polish cities. The largest anti -Semitic pogrom took place in July 1946 in Kielce, a city in
southeastern Poland. When 150 Jews returned to the city, the people w ho lived there feared that
hundreds more would reclaim their homes and belongings. The old anti -Semitic myths, like the
ritual murders of Christians by the Jews, rose again. After the spread of the rumor that the Jews
had killed a Polish boy to use the blo od in religious rituals, a disturbing crowd attacked the group

50 Elie Wiesel, Night , 5.
51 Elie Wiesel, Night , 5.

45
of survivors. The agitators killed 41 people and wounded 50 others. The news of the Kielce
pogrom spread rapidly and the Jews realized that there was no future for them in Poland.
Many survivors ended up in refugee camps set up in Western Europe, which was under
military occupation of the Allies, in places where there had previously been concentration
camps. There they waited to be admitted in places like the United States, South Africa or
Palestine. At first many countries continued their old immigration policies, which greatly limited
the number of refugees they would accept. The British government, which controlled Palestine,
rejected the entry of large numbers of Jews. Many Jews tried to enter Palestine without legal
papers and, when they were caught, they were taken to camps on the island of Cyprus, while
others were dep orted back to Germany. Britain’ s scandalous treatment of Jewish refugees
increased international pressures for the J ewish people to have a homeland. Finally, the United
Nations voted for the division of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. In the early 1948, the
British began to withdraw from Palestine. On May , 14, 1948, one of the most prominent voices
in favor o f the Jewish homeland, David Ben -Gurion, announced the formation of the State of
Israel. After this, Jewish refugee ships landed freely in the seaports of the new nation. The
United States also changed its immigration policy to allow the entry of more Jewi sh refugees.
Although many Jewish survivors were able to build new lives in their adopted countries,
many non -Jewish victims of Nazi policies continued to be persecuted in Germany. Laws
discriminating against the Roma remained in force until 1970 in some p arts of the country. The
law used in Nazi Germany to incarcerate homosexuals remained in force until
1969. “Governments have the power to create an institutional, organizational, situational
framework that will harness people to kill. They prey on pe ople’ s conformity, their deference,
and their desire to be held in the esteem of their comrades.
It is a matter of mentality and conscience. The survivors of the Holocaust have always
emphasized the idea that people should not forget what had happened at Auschwit z. They have
to learn from this sad chapter and never repeat it again.

46
Conclu ding Remarks

The Holocaust was the systematic, state -sponsored persecution and annihilation of
European Jews by the Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Members of
the Jewish community represented the main victims: six million were killed. Roma , people with
physical and mental disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or killings be cause
they belonged to a particular race, ethnicity or nationality. Million s of people, including
homosexuals, Jehovah’ s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and political dissidents, were also
victims of the oppression and death of Nazi tyranny.
In History, it is identified from the end of the 1950s with the name of the Holocaust to
what is also technically known, following the Nazi State’ s own terminology, as a “Final
Solution ” (in German, Endlösung ) of the Jewish question, that is, t he attempt to totally a nnihilate
the Jewish population of Europe. The decision was taken, quite likely, between late summer and
early fall of 1941 and the program emerged in its fullness in the spring of 1942 .Its architect and
administrative organizer was Heinrich Himmler. The r esult was the murder of just over six
million Jews through poisonous gas, bullets, gallows, clubs, fists, hunger and strenuous work.
Undoubtedly the Holocaust was one of the worst crimes committed by man and his
insatiable ambition for power and territorie s, since with the xenophobic attitude that the Germans
had to carry out the interest of the Zionists, all he achieved was the death of thousands of Jews,
Gypsies and Slavs among other ethnic groups, in addition to the death of many people who did
not have the resources to emigrate and do what the Zionists intended.
The strength of the nationalist movement has been a product of its lack of profile,
meaning that the lack of determination and ambiguity of its objective proved beneficial to its
power of attract ion, according to Niekisch. However, we can not deduce that Hitler simply
intended to come to power and not achieve certain goals. Basically, he thought of implanting the
nationalist ideology. His purpose was based on intolerance and could not settle for a role of “one
party among others” , but demanded his own party, total and exclusive. He could not allow the
traditional conception of the state.
At the center of this system was the idea of race. Only the white race, as opposed to the
black and yellow, was capable of developing creative forces. Inside were the “Aryans ” and

47
Germans, whose blood was the least mixed, the most noble and most valuable. In the opposite
pole were the Semites, physically degenerate and spiritually without creative capacity. The fat e
of the “Aryans ” was to dominate the world, which they could only achieve if they kept their
precious blood as pure as possible and did not allow it to degenerate into a mixture of races. The
race of Jews and Semites remaineda deficient one , whose existen ce was sin and a crime against
the sacred laws of life.
The Holocaust is the most dreadful tragedy suffered by the Jewish people. The massacre
marks the culmination of a long historical chain of persecution, discrimination and confinement.
The human condit ion showed its most terrible aspect in the Nazi concentration camps. The
resurgence of neo -Nazism goes so far as to deny the existence of historical facts. In this way, the
delirium of barbarism continues with the delusion of denial of existence.
Theorizi ng is the only way to cover with some possible meaning the most radical
nonsense of a catastrophe. For many years, Jews and non -Jews wanted nothing to do with horror,
with the maniacal fantasy that repressing the facts freed them from the revival of trauma tic
experiences. The magnitude of these tragic events imposes the authentic assumption of a militant
position, which always implies a denunciation and an opposition to which it resulted in the co ld
and planned massacre, on an “industrial” scale, of million s of innocents whose only crime w as
not to belong to the supposed superior “Aryan ” race.
Finally, t he planning was the extermination of a whole people by the mere fact of
incarnating the difference, and the concretion of that macabre project. The German mi litary
strategy indicated not to distract war efforts in the physical destruction of the deportees, given
the imperious military tactical necessities of the war effort in an unfavorable moment.
At the end of these atrocities, after years of failed attempts to get over the tragedies of their lives,
survivors just want to let the others understand that history should never repeat the past. Their
accounts combined with the experience of museums are the best way to get to a useful lesson :
“the museum, a s a place of performance, provides a site wherememory is activated through
storyte lling, rather than information. ”52

52 Dorita Hannah, “ Jewish Museum of Berlin: Dancing Between the Lines” IDEA: Journal: Interior Design
Educators Association (2006): 26nal:

48
As Mitchell concludes in his book, “the spectacular monument event is created in order to
produce a certain kind of collective memory, gener ally at the scale of the city and in relation to
the production of the nation ”.53

53 Katharyne Mitchel, “Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory,” Urban Geography (2003): 442

49
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