Auschwitz technicians work to preserve shoes left by children killed in camp

In a modern conservation laboratory on the grounds of the former Auschwitz camp, a man wearing blue rubber gloves uses a scalpel to scrape away rust from the eyelets of small brown shoes worn by children before they were killed in gas chambers.

Colleagues at the other end of a long work table rub away dust and grime, using soft cloths and careful circular motions on the leather of the fragile objects. The shoes are then scanned and photographed in a neighboring room and cataloged.

The work is part of a two-year effort launched last month to preserve 8,000 children’s shoes at the former concentration and extermination camp where German forces killed 1.1 million people during World War II.

The site was located during the war in a part of Poland occupied by German forces and annexed to the German Reich. Today it is a memorial and museum managed by the Polish state, to whom the solemn responsibility has fallen to preserve the evidence of the site, where Poles were also among the victims. Eight decades later, some evidence is fading away.

But more than 100,000 shoes of victims remain, some 80,000 of them in huge heaps on display in a room where visitors file by daily. Many are warped, their original colors fading, shoe laces disintegrated, yet they endure as testaments of lives brutally cut short.

The tiny shoes and slippers are especially heartrending.

“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.

Elżbieta Cajzer, head of the Collections, said conservation work always turns up some individual details of those killed at the camp.

The museum found the name of Věra Vohryzková on a child’s shoe. By coincidence, a museum worker had noticed that family name on a suitcase and the museum was able to piece together details about the family.

Vera was born Jan. 11, 1939, into a Jewish Czech family and was sent to Auschwitz in a transport from the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1943 with her mother and brother. Her father, Max Vohryzek, was sent in a separate transport. They all perished.

MICHAL DYJUK/ASSOCIATED PRESS Elzbieta Cajzer, head of the museum’s collections department, shows a collection of children’s shoes that belonged to Nazi victims at the former concentration camp Auschwitz-birkenau. A two-year effort has been launched in 2023 to preserve 8,000 children’s shoes at the former camp.