Leo Scherderman

It was late that night, that we arrived to Auschwitz. Then we were welcome by
a speech, one of those couples, He said: you saw that sign arbeit macht frev
that means freedom to labor, dont make any mistakes, nobody needs your
labor here. You did not come here to work; you came here to be killed. You
Auschwitz in many ways symbolizes the epitome of mass industrialized killing
by Nazi Germany during the holocaust. The camp was transformed from a
holding place and then placement for incarceration for polish political prisoners
into a mass killing center in a few short years. It began Its existence in 1940,
was set up by the SS in order to hold in prison polish political prisoners. When
people were brought to Auschwitz all the personal property was taken away
from them, there was a process of dehumanization that went on there.
Prisoners had their heads shaved, they were given uniforms and tattooed.
Auschwitz was the only place which prisoners were tattooed with numbers. The
conditions for living, whether those in the barracks that where created to house
horses, thousands of people often 5 to 6 to bunk.
Morris Kornberg
Here is Auschwitz, they told us, here you cannot live long, you live a day or you
live two days, is about all along you lived. The same day the kept done chasing
us, beating us, chasing us, beating us, even they took pictures of me like a
criminal, they took my clothing they told to put it in a beg where was written
my name, then we went, they saved my head, then always beaten, wherever
you go, every step.
But then over the course of time, beginning in 1941 it started to undergo some
changes as result of the interest in the SS in using the camp for force labor, for
the war effort and in 1942 it became a killing center. Particular by 1943 modern
methods for disposing the bodies with vast crematoria that were created new
forms of gas chambers that allowed for the destruction of large numbers of
human beings. So this was industrialized killing on a grand scale. Between
1942 and the end of 1944 you had almost 1 million Jews killed there, about
seventy, seventy-five thousand polls, you had about 24.000 roman same that
the gypsies, 15.000 Soviet prisoners of war as well as 10 to 15.000 political
prisoners from a variety of different countries.
Lily Appelbaum Malnik
Then one morning again world working to us that we were going to
evacuate Auschwitz, why were we evacuating Auschwitz? It is because
the Russians were coming close by, and so we all walked out Auschwitz
and we started walking, we walked for days. Ill never forget it. I dont
know how many days we walked, we walked and then we took cattle
cars and the walked again and as we walked we heard gunshots and
they told us to keep on marching. We heard gunshot, and they were
shooting people in the back. We could not keep up with the walking. It

ended up being called that much, because the ravines and the gutters
they were all red from blood.
Holocaust memorialization is important for every country in the world. In the
united states, this is a country which many holocaust survivors went after the
war, but is also important for a museum such as this to be in the united states,
because it serves as a lasting reminder of some of the perils of being a
bystander of watching as events unfold and not dealing adequately with those.