Auschwitz museum starts work of conserving shoes of 8,000 murdered children

An initiative launched last month on the grounds of the former Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp seeks to preserve 8,000 children's shoes. The laborious exercise is expected to be a two-year effort which seeks to showcase the gory reality of the camp where Adolf Hitler and his Nazi troops eviscerated millions, including children, mercilessly, from 1940 to 1945.

At the site of the camp now stands a museum and themodern conservation laboratory where the shoes are being conserved. According to an AP report, more than100,000 shoes of victims remain, some 80,000 of them in massive heaps on display in a room where visitors file by daily. Some are warped while some have their original colours fading, and shoe laces disintegrated. However, conserving them is a grim reminder of the lives brutally cut short by the megalomania of one man.

“Children’s shoes are the most moving object for me because there is no greater tragedy than the tragedy of children,” said Mirosław Maciaszczyk, a conservation specialist from the museum’s conservation laboratories.

“A shoe is an object closely related to a person, to a child. It is a trace, sometimes it’s the only trace left of the child.”

Currently, the museum is able to conserve 100 shoes a week and since the start of the exercise, 400 shoes have been processed. The experts are not attempting to restore the shoes to their original state, albeit,render them as close to how they were found at war’s end as possible. The project is expected to cost nearly $500,000 and is fundedby the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation.

The horrors of concentration camps

From mid-1942 the Nazis systematically deported Jews from all over Europe to six camps -- Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. While Nazis were able to destroy evidence of their barbarity from most camps, they could not do so at Auschwitz.

In December 1942, Poland's then London-based government-in-exile forwarded a document, titled "The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", to the Allies.

The document included detailed accounts of the unfolding Holocaust as witnessed by members of the Polish resistance, but drew disbelief and only muted reactions from the international community.

Before the Nazis sent people to the gas chambers on the compound, they were told to undress and leave everything, including their shoes outside. They were sent into the gas chamber on the pretext of being taken to the shower to be disinfected.

However, the world only learned about the horrors of the Auschwitz camp after the Soviet Red Army forcefully entered the camp on January 27, 1945.David Dushman, one of the last soldiers who liberated the camp and died in 2021 revealed that once he mowed down the electric fence using his T-34 Soviet tank, all he could see was 'skeletons' lying everywhere.

"They staggered out of the barracks, sat and lay among the dead. Terrible. We threw them all our canned food and immediately went on to hunt down the fascists," he said.

Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 with an iron fist. In a quest to create the perfect Aryan race, Hitler started the holocaust of Jews. It is reported that during his tenure, Hitler massacred over 11 million people, of which six million were Jews.

Hitler loathed Jews ever since Germany lost the First World War. As he climbed the political ladder, his hate for Jews continued to rise. Once Hitler became the chancellor, he pushed his vile anti-Semitic ideas vehemently amongst the masses. He made the ordinary Germans believe that the genocide of Jews was the right way for Germany to achieve its full socioeconomic potential.

(With inputs from agencies)

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