Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp in Poland run by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
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Culture Is This Sugarcane Plantation ‘America’s Auschwitz’?
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine featured a piece entitled “Inside America’s Auschwitz,” on the Whitney Plantation as “a rebuke – and an antidote to our sanitized history of slavery.” I came across this piece online, and I was drawn to the provocative headline as well as the setting, a town less than an hour…
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Opinion Arrive at Auschwitz a Tourist, Leave As a Traveler
My 2013 edition of Lonely Planet’s “Europe on a Shoestring” ranks Auschwitz third in “Poland Highlights” — trailing behind the gnome statues of the city of Wrocław, but ahead of the city of Gdańsk. As a Holocaust historian and architectural historian of Auschwitz, I have visited the death camp at least 80 times since my…
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Opinion How I Came To Grips With My Bias Against Poles — on Visit to Auschwitz
OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — I did a shameful thing on my first visit 20 years ago to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In a guestbook outside an Auschwitz museum exhibit featuring information on 70,000 Polish non-Jews who were murdered here, I downplayed the significance of their deaths by writing: “Your pain is no credential here,…
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Opinion Can Auschwitz Be a Graveyard and a Tourist Destination?
Menachem Rosensaft once wrote that “as much as any other event, if not more so, the Holocaust requires the chronicler to be scrupulously accurate.” He further notes that “the greater the popularity of this subject, the greater the need for vigilance regarding the treatment it is accorded.” As we approach International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we…
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Opinion How Auschwitz Can Be Both a Memorial and a Center for Education
How should we define the authentic remains of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which today are protected and preserved by the Auschwitz Memorial? Should we define it as: 150 buildings, about 300 ruins, including those of five gas chambers and four crematoria in Birkenau that are especially important to the history of…
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Fast Forward Auschwitz Museum Appeals for SS Staff Documents
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — The director of Auschwitz –Birkenau Museum has appealed to Germans and Austrians to donate documents, photographs, personal letters, or any other materials related to the SS staff of the camp. “Without a comprehensive analysis and understanding of the motivation and mentality of the perpetrators, our efforts to wisely counsel future generations…
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News Meet the Man Who Tweets From Auschwitz — the Museum, That Is
(JTA) — Long before he moved here to become the spokesman for the Auschwitz museum and lead its social media effort, Pawel Sawicki’s life was intricately connected to this sleepy town near Krakow. A Warsaw-area journalist for Polish Radio 2, Sawicki used to visit Oswiecim as a boy on holidays to stay with his grandparents…
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Fast Forward Record 2.05M People Visit Auschwitz in 2016
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) – More than 2 million people from all over the world visited the Auschwitz Museum in 2016. The 2,053,000 visitors is a record number in the history of the Museum, which this year will mark the 70th anniversary of its creation, the museum said in a statement on its website. The top…
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