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Preserving Auschwitz

(Wall Street Journal) Timothy Ryback - In the battle against Holocaust deniers, Birkenau's extermination facilities remain important forensic evidence. Today, tumbled and broken plates of concrete, the ruined structures that rise from the earth like arctic ice shoals, are the remnants of a once horrifically efficient piece of machinery. Between 1942 and 1944, more than a million human beings - mostly Jewish - were fed into these extermination plants, forced into subterranean chambers and gassed, their corpses removed and transported by mechanical conveyance to the crematoria ovens. The remnant ash was scattered in the surrounding fields, or dumped in a nearby pond whose muddied bottom, even today, is of a sticky gray viscosity laced with matchstick-size splinters of human bone. There is no arguing with the presence of the Birkenau gas chambers. Here the proof of the Holocaust is written in concrete and steel. )
2004-06-09 00:00:00
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