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Most of the Auschwitz camp buildings, the barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, and the entrance gate inscribed "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes Free") have been preserved as the Museum of Martyrdom (daily: June-Aug 8am-7pm; May & Sept 8am-6pm; April & Oct 8am-5pm; Jan, Feb & late Dec 8am-3pm; March & Nov-Dec 15 8am-4pm; free). What you won't find here any longer, though, are the memorial stone and succession of plaques placed in front of and around the camp by the postwar communist authorities claiming that four million people died in a place officially described as an "International Monument to Victims of Fascism". In a symbolic intellectual clean-up, the inflated numerical estimates were removed and the lack of references to the central place of Jews in the genocide carried out in Auschwitz-Birkenau were remedied in 1990 at the orders of the International Committee set up to oversee the running of the site. The cinema is a sobering starting point. The film shown was taken by the Soviet troops who liberated the camp in May 1945 - its harrowing images of the survivors and the dead aimed at confirming for future generations what really happened. The board outside lists timings for showings in different languages, although you can pay for a special showing of the English-language version (15zl). The bulk of the camp consists of the prison cell blocks, the first section being given over to "exhibits" found in the camp after liberation. Despite last-minute destruction of many of the thirty-five storehouses used for the possessions of murdered inmates, there are rooms full of clothes and suitcases, toothbrushes, dentures, glasses, a huge collection of shoes and a huge mound of women's hair - 70 tonnes of it. It's difficult to relate to the scale of what's shown. Block 11 , further on, is where the first experiments with Zyklon B gas were carried out on Soviet POWs and other inmates in 1941. Between two of the blocks stands the flower-strewn Death Wall , where thousands of prisoners were summarily executed with a bullet in the back of the head. As in the other concentration camps, the Auschwitz victims included people from all over Europe - over twenty nationalities in all. Many of the camp barracks are given over to national memorials , moving testimonies to Nazi actions throughout occupied Europe as well as the sufferings of inmates of the different countries - Poles, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Norwegians, Turks, French, Italians and more. The exhibitions haven't changed much over the years and the displays are starting to fade with age - notably the obviously outdated "Yugoslav" memorial, which contains a highly inappropriate lionization of Tito's wartime partisan movement and next to nothing about Auschwitz. This section is closed between October and April, except for those on guided tours. Another, larger, barrack, no. 27 (open year-round), is labelled simply "Jews" . There's a long, labyrinthine display of photographs inside, although they're left, unlabelled, to speak for themselves. The atmosphere is one of quiet reverence, in which the evils of Auschwitz are felt and remembered rather than detailed and dissected. On the second floor, there's a section devoted to Jewish resistance both inside and outside the camp, some of which was organized in tandem with the Polish AK (Armia Krajowa), or Home Army, some entirely autonomously. A simple tablet commemorates Israeli President Chaim Herzog's visit here in 1992. Despite the strength and power of this memorial, some still find it disconcerting to see it lumped in among the others, as if Jews were just another "nationality" among many to suffer at the hands of the Nazis. Despite other recent changes in the way events in Auschwitz are officially presented, this is one aspect of the old-style presentation of the Jewish dimension of the camp that you may feel has still not been fully addressed. The prison blocks terminate by the gas chambers and the ovens where the bodies were incinerated. "No more poetry after Auschwitz", in the words of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno.
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