Photos

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.”- Ellie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner who dedicated his life to preserving the memory of the Holocaust victims.

This picture was taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Birkenau was the largest of all the Nazi extermination camps. It was the site of the deaths of at least 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles, and some 19,000 Roma (Gypsies), mostly through gassing. Its remains are located in Poland approximately 50 kilometers west of Kraków.

In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

From may 1940 till the end of 1944 prisoners were transported here from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in daily convoys. Arrivals at the complex were separated into two main groups - those marked for immediate extermination, and those to be registered as prisoners.

The first group, about three-quarters of the total, went to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau within a few hours; they included all children, all women with children, all the elderly, and all those who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not to be fully fit. SS personnel told the victims that they were to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims would undress in an outer chamber and walk into the gas chamber, which was disguised as a shower facility, complete with dummy shower heads. After the doors were shut, SS men would dump in the cyanide pellets via holes in the roof or windows on the side. In the Auschwitz Birkenau camp more than 20,000 people could be gassed and cremated each day.

Those deemed fit to work were used as slave labor at industrial factories. At the Auschwitz complex 405,000 prisoners were recorded as slaves between 1940 and 1945. Of these about 340,000 perished through executions, beatings, starvation, and sickness.

Some quotes about the Holocaust

"This gold button, I could have bought 5 more jew if I sold this button." Oskar Schindler from Schindler’s List (movie)

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." Elie Wiesel

"Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different from all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example." Anne Frank, "Diary of a Young Girl"