More than six decades after the Holocaust, the museum at the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau has turned to ultra-modern technology to ensure the legacy of Nazis’ victims is never lost.
The challenge was how to preserve masses of suitcases, shoes, eye-glasses, human hair and other poignant reminders of the lives of those exterminated under Hitler’s ”final solution”. Now a team of eight conservation specialists is finding answers at the museum’s own hi-tech laboratory built three years ago.
The Auschwitz museum, which this week marks its 60th anniversary, used to turn to outside facilities.
”There are well-developed techniques for conserving centuries-old Rembrandts or Goyas, or Egyptian mummies which are thousands of years old. But not for 60-year-old toothbrushes or suitcases,” says Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz museum.
”We’re in uncharted territory where we have to develop new techniques,” he says. ”On top of that, the very number of items takes us beyond the usual methods of conservation.”
On an enormous white table, two experts in paper conservation work on precious documents from the museum’s archive. One of them, Ewelina Bisaga, is deftly wielding a special eraser to clean a copy of the Peer Gynt Suite by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg.
”These are the scores used by the camp prisoners’ orchestra,” she says.
The Nazis set up Auschwitz mostly for members of the Polish resistance, nine months after invading Poland in 1939. It was housed in what had been a Polish army barracks on the outskirts of the southern town of Oswiecim — named Auschwitz in German — and two years later was expanded at nearby Brzezinka, or Birkenau.
About 1,1-million people died at the death camp between 1940 and 1945 — one million of them Jews from Poland and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe — some by overwork, starvation and disease, but most in the notorious gas chambers.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest camp in a vast Nazi network, stretching across a swathe of occupied Europe, that claimed the lives of six million Jews.
The Nazis hoarded the personal effects of their victims and these later became a central feature of the camp museum, which was set up by the Polish government in 1947. Among the items are 4 000 suitcases, tens of thousands of shoes, a mountain of brushes and two tonnes of human hair that was used by the Nazis to stuff mattresses.
The holdings also include the archives of the camp administration and 2 000 art works created by prisoners, most of which are kept in a warehouse because space is lacking at the museum.
Urgency
The conservation effort took on new urgency in recent years because ”it is only with time that the world has become aware of the educational value” of these personal effects, says Cywinski.
Auschwitz-Birkenau draws about a million visitors a year and for some, its anonymous, late-1940s displays of heaped objects speak for themselves. But the museum feared that such exhibits could lose meaning for people who did not live through the war or its aftermath but were more interested in the fate of individual victims — a story that could be told through objects.
However, preserving even a simple suitcase is a complex job, with metal, leather, cloth and cardboard all requiring different conservation methods. And to deal with the massive number of shoes, the laboratory has trained hundreds of local schoolchildren in conservation skills.
The team is also responsible for conserving the Auschwitz-Birkenau site. ”We have big problems with water leaks, particularly in the buildings constructed by the prisoners at Birkenau,” says Cywinski.
While the Auschwitz site remains much as it was during the war, Birkenau was heavily damaged when the Nazis blew up the gas chambers and adjoining crematoria in a bid to cover up their crimes from the advancing Soviet army in January 1945.
Today, the ruins are open to the elements.
”We have to preserve them in their current state, while also ensuring we don’t change anything,” says laboratory director Dorota Kuczynska. — AFP
