The Auschwitz memorial under threat
Artefacts from the Nazi death camp are vital reminders of the Holocaust, writes Colin Freeman
Aryeh Pinsker remembers the moment he learned that he was unlikely to leave Auschwitz alive. It was May 1944, and he, his parents and his eight siblings had just arrived on a cattle truck from Hungary. Having got separated from the rest of his family in the crowds, he was sent to have his hair shaved while they queued for what they were told was the “shower block”.
“I asked another boy who’d already been there a couple of weeks: ‘When will my parents be back from their shower?’ The boy pointed to a building and said: ‘They will come out of that chimney’.”
The chimney protruded from the crematorium at the rear of the “shower block” – in reality a gas chamber, where Pinsker’s parents and six of his eight siblings were poisoned with Zyklon B, and then reduced to cinders.
Eighty years on, he has little else to remember them by – which is why, on a return visit to the camp last week, he wept quietly at the sight of a row of battered, age-blackened leather shoes on a table.
“If those shoes weren’t here, the world would not have believed what happened at Auschwitz,” he tells The Telegraph. “I have no way of even knowing if these particular ones belong to my siblings, but this is all we have left of all those children who were murdered.”
The shoes are among some 8,000 items of children’s footwear still kept at Auschwitz – all that remains of around 232,000 youngsters murdered there, most of them not long after arrival. Today they are one of the camp’s most haunting exhibits, some carrying the imprints of the small feet that took their final steps in them. Yet like Pinsker, now 92, the shoes are now getting old.
Over the years, the leather, wooden heels, laces and buckles have aged, cracked, rusted and decomposed, to the point where museum officials have warned that they are now at risk of disintegration altogether. So to mark today’s Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish ish New Year, Holocaust memorial groups ps have launched a new fund – Soul to Sole – to preserve each and every child’s shoe for posterity.
It is no small task. Most of the e shoes were cheap wartime-issue footwear wear at best, ill-suited for the long camp p winters in mud, damp and freezing cold. Each one will require its own individual care plan, removing dirt and bacteria that can encourage decay and using chemicals to halt the ageing process. The project is expected to cost millions of pounds, but its backers see it as a worthwhile investment.
“As each day passes, fewer of our survivors walk among us, and these shoes tell stories,” says Phyllis Greenberg, president of the International March of the Living, the annual survivors’ walk to Auschwitz. “We also have a moral responsibility to preserve every piece of evidence.” Shoes played an important part in Pinsker’s own experience at Auschwitz, where around 1.3million people died in all. Aged 13 when he arrived, he was sent to the medical experiments block, where his own footwear was taken from him and he was given a pair of wooden, clog-like shoes instead. They had no inner lining to protect his feet against the bitterly cold Polish winter, nor was he issued with socks. The medical wing’s doctors wanted to observe how the human body coped with extremes of cold – ostensibly to learn lessons for the benefit of German soldiers serving on the Russian front.
“We were made to sleep lined up on concrete slabs of cold cement, then at 4am we’d be beaten and shoved outside in the freezing cold,” he remembers. “A lot of people died in winter – you went to sleep not knowing if you’d wake up.”
“Your shoes would help keep you alive in that cold. I kept mine on all the time, because I was afraid someone might steal them if I took them off.”
Another Auschwitz survivor, Miriyam Harel, remembers being forced to remove her shoes to run across a 20ft-long path of broken glass set up by the guards. “They forced us to run barefoot, holding the shoes in our hands,” she says. “If anyone made a sound, they were shot dead.”
In the medical experiments wing, Pinsker was also subjected to experiments to see how little food the human body could survive on. “We were fed preserved frogs and different pond life, to see which frogs could be eaten,” he says. “And once per day we were given a soup that was covered in a kind of skin – I was petrified that it was human skin, because of the terrible things that were being done to us in the camp.”
Pinsker says that, of the 1,000 children he was originally held with, all but 26 perished. Some died from beatings or neglect – one committed suicide by hurling himself against an electric fence. Pinsker was later transferred to Dachau, and as Allied Forces encroached in spring 1945, was taken on a “death march” towards Austria, where prisoners were shot if they could not keep up.
On the sixth day, Pinsker collapsed, and was found unconscious two hours later by Allied troops. When he came to in a US field hospital, he assumed at first that the bedsheets were a shroud, and that the US medic at his bedside was an angel in Heaven.
He was eventually reunited with one surviving brother and moved to Israel, where his children remember him suffering regular nightmares. For years, he remained silent about his experience, hoping the memories might fade like the camp number tattooed on his arm. Eventually, his granddaughter persuaded him to talk.
“In the camp, some people went crazy, while others like me survived by just not thinking about what was going on,” he says. “I tried not to think about it after I left as well, but then I realised I needed to talk about it to warn future generations never to let it happen again.”
In recent years, he has visited Auschwitz more than 20 times – “though every time feels just like the first” – and spoken widely about his family’s fate. He says, though, that the shoes tell the story in a way that words never can.
Most of the footwear has no marks through which owners can be identified, but very occasionally, restoration work yields breakthroughs. In May, staff discovered inside a shoe the name of a Czech Jewish girl, Věra Vohryzková. Staff then linked her to a suitcase belonging to her uncle František Aufrecht, who also died in the camp.
The shoes are not the only exhibits in a state of decay. Over the years, Auschwitz’s museum staff have preserved many other prisoners’ effects, including nearly 4,000 suitcases, and everything from spectacles and prosthetics to prayer shawls and shaving brushes.
Similar expertise has been applied to items used in the slaughter, including rusting canisters of Zyklon B poison, the rotting buildings where prisoners were held, and even the fake showerheads in the gas chambers.
Many of the preservation techniques involved are similar to ones used in restoring antiques, historic buildings and the paintings of old masters. The camp’s SS archive, for example, has been preserved with the documents’ original folds with the help of Japanese tissue, a substance made from mulberry trees used to repair ancient manuscripts.
Chemicals have been used to make the original SS logos visible again on guards’ helmets. A painting of an “ideal” German family that adorned the SS officers’ mess hall has also been restored.
Some detect a certain irony in such care going into restoring instruments of mass murder, arguing that visitors should be encouraged to use their imaginations. In 1958, there was even a proposal to build a concrete “road of death” over the camp, a mile long and 75 yards wide, and let the rest of the ruins crumble. Survivors rejected it, saying such an abstract monument did not truly convey their suffering.
They also knew that the presence of the artefacts – and, in the case of items like the shoes, their sheer quantity – would rebuff the claims of Holocaust deniers.
“If the vital testimony of the Holocaust is threatened, be it by politicians in Iran or by certain academics, it’s behoven of all of us to defend it,” says Eitan Neishlos, an Australian tech entrepreneur whose own Neishlos Foundation is cofinancing the shoe preservation project. “We must do whatever we can to preserve the victims’ memory.”
‘If those shoes weren’t here, the world would not have believed what happened’