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Holocaust and WW II

Another exhibitions in the Auschwitz - Birkenau Museum

 

The national exhibitions at the Auschwitz I Stammlager

In addition to the main exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum there are also eleven national exhibitions in the prisoners’ blocks in Auschwitz I – Stammlager. These are supplementary in nature and are devoted to the histories of prisoners of various national origins, designed to show the links between the German occupation of particular countries and the history of the camp. At present there are 11 national exhibitions:

- Jewish, Roma, Polish, Dutch, French, Belgian, Hungarian, Austrian, Slovak, Czech and Russian. The most recent addition, opened in 2013, is a supplementary exhibition by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, entitled “Shoah”.

The “Shoah” exhibition by the Yad Vashem Institute 

This moving exhibition is devoted to the life of Europe’s Jews before the war, the ideology of the German Nazis, and the extermination of the Jews perpetrated in German-occupied Europe. One of the rooms is dedicated specifically to the memory of the children murdered during the Holocaust. The final element of the display is a room with a book of names, in which all the names of Shoah victims gathered by the Yad Vashem Institute are inscribed.

The exhibition “Before they left” in the central bathhouse, the “Sauna” at the Auschwitz II - Birkenau

This exhibition is located in Auschwitz II – Birkenau, at the opposite end of the camp to the entrance gate, a few hundred metres further on from the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria. The “Sauna”, as the prisoners referred to it, was in fact a bathhouse, where newly arrived internees were received and registered. It was here, where stripped of their civilian clothing, shaved, disinfected and tattooed, that they ceased to be people and were reduced to “numbers” in the camp card files. The exhibition in the “Sauna” documents that process.

The bathhouse building also houses another exhibition. These are private photographs of prisoners and their families, found in the luggage with which they arrived at the camp, and giving an insight into their private lives before the Holocaust.