Auschwitz Concentration Camp

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Auschwitz

EVEN IN THE SILENCE OF THE POLISH countryside, Auschwitz can not rest in peace. The name alone prompts instant recognition--a shorthand for the criminal barbarity of the 20th century. If ever there were a place in which myth was unseemly and unnecessary, where fact could be left unadorned, it would be Auschwitz. For 50 years, that has not been the case.

The list of myths and misconceptions about the largest Nazi concentration camp is a long one. Soviet investigators declared in May 1945 that 4 million people had died in Auschwitz, and the Polish Communist authorities stuck to this inflated figure until they lost power in 1989. Since then the number has heen revised to between 1.1 million and 1.5 million, which most historians now believe is accurate. Until the Soviet bloc fell, the exhibits at Auschwitz downplayed the number of Jewish victims, suggesting that their part of the total was smaller than the 90 percent figure generally accepted today. In the West, many erroneously believed that the camp was created to murder Jews, and that Auschwitz was the primary killing ground for Polish Jews. The facts are more complex.

A former army barracks located near the town of Oswiecim, or Auschwitz in German, the main camp received its first transport of 728 Poles in June 1940. These were political prisoners, usually affiliated with resistance movements. In most cases, they were Catholics, since the deportations of Jews had not yet begun. But as soon as those first prisoners arrived, they were treated to a speech that signaled the future evolution of the camp. "You have come not to a sanatorium but to a German concentration camp where the only way out is through the chimney," Karl Fritsch, the SS chief in charge of the prisoners, declared. "If someone doesn't like it, he can throw himself on the barbed wire. If there are Jews in the transport, they don't have the right to live more than two weeks; priests, one month, and the others, three months."

"The camp was created to destroy the most valuable part of Polish society, and the Germans partly succeeded in this," says Zygmunt Gaudasinski, an early political prisoner there. Some prisoners, like Guadasinski's father, were shot; torture was commonplace, and the early mortality rate was very high. That changed once prisoners latched onto jobs--in the kitchens, warehouses and other sheltered places--which increased their odds for survival.

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