![]() We must not neglect either what happened to those who disappeared in the death marches from the camps in 1945. The experiences of those in the ghettoes of German-occupied Eastern Europe or those who fell before the guns of the Einsatzgruppen (the special, mobile killing squads staffed by the SD, Gestapo, and Order Police) cannot be assimilated to the kind of industrial murder Auschwitz-Birkenau represented. Transforming Auschwitz-Birkenau into such a symbol, however, risks doing injustice to many of the victims of the Third Reich’s monstrous project of killing every single Jewish man, woman, and child on the European continent. In this type of discourse, “Auschwitz” becomes a symbol or central metaphor for the Holocaust as a whole. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex looms so large in discussions of the Nazi genocide that many intellectuals prefer to speak of “after Auschwitz,” of a definitive and catastrophic rupture in world history. Anne Frank, the Holocaust victim most familiar to Americans, spent several weeks there before being removed to Bergen-Belsen, where she perished. An abridged list of them would include Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Olga Lengyel, Aharon Appelfeld, Jean Améry, Filip Müller, Maurice Cling, Charlotte Delbo, Rudolf Vrba, Hermann Langbein, Giuliana Tedeschi, and Otto Dov Kulka. Many of the survivors whose books and speeches profoundly shaped our understanding of the Holocaust passed through and out of its gates. Over 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Roma and Sinti, and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war died in Auschwitz-Birkenau as well. That staggering figure does not nearly exhaust the number of its victims. Both a forced-labor camp and a site for mass, mechanized annihilation, more than 1.1 million Jews from across Europe were murdered there before the Red Army arrived on January 27, 1945. For historical reasons, this is quite understandable. Courtesy of the Holocaust Research Project.įrequently, Auschwitz-Birkenau overshadows the other Nazi killing centers in the American popular imagination. ![]() Top Image: 1944 Photo of Sobibor Survivors Top Row, First from Right is Leon Feldhendler. ![]()
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