A Polish Effort to Preserve Auschwitz

As the Holocaust generation gradually fades away, survivors of the camps, particularly of Auschwitz, are concerned about keeping the memory of the Shoah alive.

Many of the camps no longer exist; they have been destroyed and in their stead stand shopping malls, office blocks, residential complexes and service stations, with nothing to remind future generations of the atrocities that took place on the sites.

But the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, one of the most horrendous and thus important in terms of testimony, remains. There have been attempts to tear it down, but these have so far been resisted.

Former Polish foreign affairs minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a prisoner of Auschwitz whose number was 4427 and who has been recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous among the Nations, is among those concerned that the suffering and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, political prisoners and the mentally and physically challenged from all over Europe will be forgotten if Auschwitz is destroyed.