Praise for those who helped inmates
At a ceremony outside the site, Holocaust survivors and local residents listened to a letter from Polish President Lech Kaczynski in which he said that the world has underestimated the determination of people outside the camp to save prisoners.
“World public opinion has often held that the residents of the area were completely indifferent to the fate of the prisoners,” Kaczynski said in the letter, which denounced “such unjust statements”.
A presidential aide, undersecretary of state Ewa Junczyk-Ziomecka, pinned medals on about 40 people from the town of Oswiecim, where Auschwitz is located, and surrounding villages.
Nazi Germany set up Auschwitz after occupying Poland, at first mostly imprisoning political prisoners. However, it was later expanded into a complex where as many as 1.5 million people were murdered, most of them Jews, but also Gypsies, Roman Catholics who opposed the Nazi regime, and homosexuals.
The camp was liberated on January 27, 1945 by the advancing Soviet army.
Also on Saturday, politicians and survivors gathered at the former Buchenwald concentration camp in eastern Germany, marking what the UN has established as an annual day of Holocaust remembrance.
Meanwhile, a British expert on Auschwitz has warned that plans to preserve the former death camp could give Holocaust deniers more ammunition for their claims that the Nazis’ mass murder of millions was fabricated.
Jonathan Webber, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Birmingham and a member of the International Auschwitz Council, a board which advises administrators at the camp, says he is particularly concerned about a move to build retaining walls around the gas chambers to prevent them sinking.
“Anyone tampering with gas chambers is tampering with the heart and soul of what Auschwitz represents,” said Webber, who has urged the council to seek the advice of the best engineering experts in the worldbefore starting any work.
But time and tourism is taking its toll and the camp’s new director, historian Piotr Cywinski, 34, is searching for ways to preserve vital evidence and update exhibits without chipping away at Auschwitz’s authenticity or diluting the evidence of atrocities.
“The biggest dilemma of this place is preserving what is authentic while also keeping it possible for people to see and to touch,” he said.
His most sensitive problem is what to do about the remains of the gas chambers which are slowly sinking into the ground.
Any decay at all poses a problem given the camp’s role today in standing as a testimony of the atrocities.
For all that to crumble would deprive future generations of priceless historical evidence of Nazi atrocities — a further concern in the light of Holocaust denial.
