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On the way to Auschwitz:
Herded on cattle wagons
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International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January commemorates the tragedy of the Holocaust that occurred during the Second World War. It commemorates the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews and 11 million others, including Romani, homosexuals and communists, by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
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| The entrance, "Work makes you free" |
On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp, was liberated by the Red Army.
Looking more closely at the Nazi camps, Auschwitz was singular and unprecedented. No Jewish woman, man or child deported to the camp was meant to survive. Young, old, weak and sick Jews were murdered on arrival in specially constructed gas chambers, while the others were selected by the SS for experimentation (see photo) and ‘destruction through labour’. As a vast hybrid slave-labour and death camp, Auschwitz has no equal.
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| Experiments on children |
I visited Auschwitz in 1951 and saw some of things shown in these photos. I clearly remember the gas chambers and ovens, rooms full of shoes, spectacles, artificial limbs and crutches, and hundreds of yards of bone fragments found on one side of the railway track
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Nazi Sonderkommando and naked bodies
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Women's dormitory
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If you are in Wellington arrange to visit the Holocaust Centre. It's open 10am-1pm most weekdays and Sundays.
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| Doomed children |
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| Helping a starved man |
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| Rooms full of the shoes of the dead |
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| Spectacles of the dead |
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| Auschwitz was only one of many concentration camps |
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