The Auschwitz Exhibition

This past weekend I saw a traveling exhibition in Boston about the Auschwitz concentration camp. It contains over 700 objects from shoes to gas masks to implements of torture and experimentation. The exhibit was co-produced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and has been in several other locations but is only up for a few more days in Boston. There is no information about where it might be next. You can read more about it on their site. 

The exhibit's tag line "Not long ago. Not far away." is a great reminder that those who do not learn their history are doomed to repeat it. In today's political climate where Holocaust deniers and Nazi admirers are given significant air time in the media, candidates for the highest offices use their rhetoric and they are winning elections in Germany, it is more important than ever that these stories and artifacts are presented to refute the denials. You came here for maps? This exhibit delivers plenty of them, more than I can easily show in one post. Here are some of the more significant examples.

Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, a Polish town that began as a typical fenced medieval settlement. It became important as a railway junction and also for it's location on the border (at various times) of nations, provinces and occupied areas. This map highlights the railways lines and shades in the locations of the camps as well as the rubber factory that used slave labor from the camps.

The camp originally housed mostly Poles who did not completely cooperate with their occupiers but in time it became a death camp for Jews, Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, the disabled, and political prisoners. Here is a map of the Auschwitz camp and the expanded Birkenau camp to the west of it. 

via Yad Vashem

I took a picture of it but I'm using a copy from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, because it is much more clear than what I was able to capture. 

The camps grew into a major network.

Jews were rounded up throughout German occupied and allied countries and deported to Auschwitz as this huge wall map shows.

In 1945 as the Russian army started closing in on the area, the surviving prisoners were subjected to even more brutality as they were forcibly marched, on foot and then in rail cars in the middle of winter to other camps deeper in Germany. This was in part to try to continue hiding Nazi atrocities from the rest of the world.

There are quite a few other maps including a world ethnographic map from 1897 exemplifying the racial attitudes of the time, a map of Madagascar, where it was proposed that Jews be deported and this map from 1936 of concentration camps and prisons, published by exiles seeking to dissuade international athletes from participating in the Berlin Olympics that year.

The exhibition runs through this weekend at the Castle at Park Plaza in Boston 

Here are some useful links for more information:

The exhibition's web site

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Yad Vashem