The red brick barracks that housed starving inmates are sinking into ruin. Time has warped victims' leather shoes into strange shapes. Hair sheared to make cloth is slowly turning to dust.
Auschwitz is crumbling — the world's most powerful and important testament to Nazi Germany's crimes falling victim to age and mass tourism. Now guardians of the memorial site are waging an urgent effort to save what they can before it is too late.
There is no other place on this earth where the chilling crimes of the Nazis and their 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' can be seen so plainly. Auschwitz is forever burned into the memories of those who endured it. For many Jews, it is a place where family members died and were buried or cremated, and while not holy, should be respected as a place of the dead. But even more so, for the rest of us, it is a reminder that we can never let this happen again, that the massive wholesale and orderly efficiency with which so many people were murdered is still a form of butchery. It is a bastion against those who would deny its existence, and that of the Holocaust itself. It is an opportunity to teach new generations of the horror that can come when ordinary people do extraordinarily evil (and to be fair, in some cases heroic things). It should not be allowed to crumble to dust, but rather be preserved for the present, and for the future, with the hope that this will never happen again.
Says museum director Piotr Cywinski:
"There are no more remains of Treblinka, Kulmhof, Sobibor and Belzec," Cywinski said, referring to extermination camps that the Nazis destroyed in an effort to hide their crimes. "Let us not allow the biggest of these death camps — and the only one that is still recognizable — to fall into decay due to the ravages of time and our indifference."
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