POLAND: After almost seventy years of neglect history's most infamous concentration camps are being restored

Record ID: 777554

  • Title: POLAND: After almost seventy years of neglect history's most infamous concentration camps are being restored
  • Date: 2nd February 2007
  • Summary: (EU) OSWIECIM, POLAND (JANUARY 18, 2007) (REUTERS) TOURISTS AT ENTRANCE TO AUSCHWITZ / BIRKENAU MUSEUM SIGN OVER GATE READING 'ARBEIT MACHT FREI' (English) 'WORK GIVES FREEDOM' TOURISTS LISTENING TO GUIDE SKULL AND CROSS BONES SIGN/ TOURISTS TOURIST WALKING ON PAVEMENT BARBED WIRE AND TOURISTS IN BACKGROUND THE TOUR ENTERS BUILDING BUILDING NUMBER TOURISTS ON WORN FLOOR TOURIST WALKING INTO ROOM ARCHIVE PHOTO OF PRISONERS ON WALL TOUR LOOKING AT EXHIBITION (SOUNDBITE) (Polish) DIRECTOR OF MUSEUM, PIOTR CYWINSKI SAYING: "It's obvious that this camp wasn't made to last long. These are not durable structures especially the wooden barracks, but the brick buildings aren't faring well either. After a few decades we are having to intensify the conservation and preservation work." BIRKENAU TRAIN LINES RENOVATED BARRACKS BARRACKS SURROUNDED BY TAPE. SIGN READING "NO ENTRY" BARRACKS CLOSED OFF BY TAPE INTERIOR OF RENOVATED BARRACKS SIGN READING 'PRESERVATION WORKS'
  • Embargoed: 17th February 2007 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Poland
  • Country: Poland
  • Topics: War / Fighting,History
  • Reuters ID: LVA63B4Q9FZ1YCG2HIRSJPWGZ6MM
  • Story Text: Just as survivors visiting the camp dwindle each year, so time is bearing down on the prison buildings, the rusting barbed-wire fencing and remnants of the gas chambers left behind when the Germans fled in January 1945.
    Evidence of the victims -- hair, spectacles, children's toys and other belongings -- is also falling to pieces, eaten away by insects and mildew, its disappearance giving slow support to those who try to deny the Holocaust ever happened.
    Unless conservation is stepped up there may soon be little left of the biggest graveyard in Europe, where up to 1.5 million men, women and children, mostly Jews, were slaughtered.
    Now new management at the camp, covering 470 acres (190 ha) on two sites near Oswiecim in southern Poland, is accelerating work and hiring more staff to slow the deterioration and save the site as a lesson for future generations.
    "It's not only the preservation department but also the employees of the museum who try to conserve this place so that all of us, including the next generations have a chance to see what it really looked like and to witness it in its authenticity instead of reading and looking at it in charts and photographs," Rafal Pioro, head of preservation, said.
    One of the many problems facing the 260 staff at the site, now a museum, is that Auschwitz was not built to last. The concentration camp known as Auschwitz was actually two camps, and both are suffering serious problems.
    "It's obvious that this camp wasn't made to last long. These are not durable structures especially the wooden barracks but the brick buildings aren't fairing well either. After a few decades we are having to intensify the conservation and preservation work," Piotr Cywinski, the director of the museum said.
    Auschwitz I, a stone and brick-built Polish military base used by the Nazis to house Polish political prisoners, was hastily enlarged with forced labour using the cheapest possible materials after Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
    Auschwitz II Birkenau, two miles (3 km) away, was a specially built killing factory thrown up in 1943 for the mass murder of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other minorities.
    Linked directly to Europe's railway network by a special siding to speed up the murders, the Nazis used it to expedite their plans for a "Final Solution" to "the Jewish problem".
    "Emotions play a big role in our job; the fact that we know that these buildings have a tragic history. In this context this job tends to be difficult, it makes you think more about some things, about life." Pioro said.
    Parts of the Birkenau site are built from the remains of demolished Polish villages and stable blocks and these have survived. But many other buildings have already disappeared.
    Most wooden huts were removed after the war for use as temporary shelters. And the strongest of the buildings, the concrete gas chambers and crematoriums, were blown up by the guards before their retreat. These ruins have collapsed, undermined by rising ground water, flooding and erosion.
    The area around the gas chambers is cordoned off with tape but still accessible to the public, some of whom clamber over the rubble. Some visitors even remove relics and artefacts.
    Cywinski is acutely aware of the deficiencies of the museum but is constrained by money and the physical limitations imposed by the scale of the site.
    Various grandiose ideas -- including one for a giant dome -- have been rejected on grounds of cost and because any major construction would destroy some of the area and alter it.
    Smaller-scale enclosures to protect the buildings would be possible, but even these would be expensive and would have to be agreed by all the groups that protect the site.
    But money is not the main problem: the Polish government has provided large sums and there are a number of international donors.
    Time itself is the enemy, eroding the site and its contents.
    Workers at Auschwitz are struggling to slow the ageing of the camp and keep it as a lesson on the evils of anti-Semitism.
    They aim, in the words of a plaque near the gas chambers, to keep Auschwitz as "a cry of despair and a warning to humanity".
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