Death camp site to be renovated
By VANESSA GERA
Associated Press  Tuesday, 5 December 2006

WARSAW, Poland — The International Auschwitz Council agreed Tuesday to modernize a 51-year-old [sic]* exhibition at the site of the Nazi death camp and build walls to prevent the ruins of gas chambers from sinking into the ground.

The decision to renovate and preserve remains of the vast Nazi death camp in southern Poland marks a change in the long-standing approach to maintaining the site, which has been left as the Allies found it when they liberated the camp at the end of World War II.

But two of the gas chambers are slowly sinking into the ground and will likely slide out of sight within the next two decades if nothing is done. How to save them prompted debate on the council, with a majority favoring a Polish expert's proposal to halt the erosion by building walls sunk into the ground on either side of the slipping chambers.

"We have to preserve without reconstruction," said Piotr Cywinski, the new director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. He warned that doing nothing is tantamount to letting history slip away: "We must decide to do this if we want to be able to see these gas chambers in 20 years."

'Tampering with the gas chambers'

However, one council member said international engineering experts should be consulted first to avoid opening up the Auschwitz administrators to accusations of "tampering with the gas chambers," said Jonathan Webber, a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Birmingham.

The council also backed a proposal to renovate an aging exhibition dating back to the early years of communist rule in Poland. Cywinski said the exhibition, in austere barracks at the sprawling complex, has become old-fashioned compared to modern museums like Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

It is "the oldest exhibition about the Shoah (Holocaust) in the world," Cywinski said on the sidelines of the daylong council meeting in Warsaw. "We really must change."

Some Holocaust survivors in Israel fear modernization could make the camp seem more like a museum and damage the somberness of the site where nearly 1.5 million** people, most of them Jews, were slaughtered by the Nazis.

Cywinski said no changes would be made to the remaining crematoria, barracks and watchtowers, and he pledged to keep the powerful exhibits of hair, glasses and other personal belongings that were stripped from victims.

Possible changes include building an educational center and introducing audioguide tours — though Cywinski promised the place would not become "technological or multimedia."

Several Nazi camp sites, including Bergen-Belsen, have received makeovers, which experts say is part of a trend to make them more attractive for tourists. Some feel similar renovations at Auschwitz will to make the Nazi's largest camp seem less foreboding.

The council — a committee made up of Holocaust survivors, scholars and religious leaders — has strong influence on what happens at the site. The site is administered by a group of Polish-government appointed officials.

 

Notes by New Order

* 1955 — that's 10 years AFTER World War II!

** Originally it was claimed that "4 million" were gassed at this wartime internment facility. Then the official death count dropped to "1.5 million" — 3.5 million fewer — although the magic "Six Million" figure somehow remained unaltered! According to the Auschwitz Death Registers, released in 1995 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the actual number who died at Auschwitz was 74,000 — including German personnel — from ALL causes, especially a devastating outbreak of typhus.

Overall, between 250-350 thousand Jews died in WWII, mostly as a result of diseases such as typhus, malnutrition and starvation, occasioned by Allied bombing of German supply lines.

For the true story of this celebrated World War II internment center, read Auschwitz: The Final Count, a summary anthology of evidence compiled by Vivian Bird, available for $17 postage paid from: NS Publications, PO Box 188, Wyandotte MI 48192, USA.