AP Photos: Silence pervades Auschwitz on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation
AP Photos: Silence pervades Auschwitz on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the camp's liberation
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Silence pervades the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau today. Sometimes the only sounds are the soft footsteps of visitors, people who come from all over the world to mourn and to learn, and the voices of their guides speaking in hushed tones into microphones trying to explain the ungraspable.
It can feel that time has stood still at the place where Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people, most of them Jews. Some objects look just as they did when the camp was liberated by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945, an anniversary being marked at the site on Monday.
There are the barracks which housed prisoners, a wall where the Nazi German forces shot prisoners to death, the gas chambers and crematoria where they were gassed to death and cremated. Encircling the vast site are barbed wire fences, which even today look as they did in wartime images.
And there are still the railway tracks leading from the camp into the surrounding rural area, the same tracks used to transport people to the killing site in the center of Europe. Trees and other vegetation have grown over them in some places, a reminder that they were abandoned long ago.
A single woman’s shoe in a huge pile of footwear taken from the prisoners on arrival still has such a vibrant red hue that it seems as if someone might have walked or danced in it not too long ago. But it sits amid a heap of other shoes dark with age and decay.
