'Terror in the Soul': Remembering Auschwitz

Luke, Tom, UN Chronicle

Sixty years ago, in January 1945, Auschwitz was "liberated". Some of the people commemorating this event are surviving witnesses, whose numbers are rapidly diminishing and will soon reach complete extinction.

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To some, Auschwitz is already an historical notion, a symbol of horror; to others, it is an impersonal subject for (academic) speculation. There are also thriving schools of "thought" questioning the sums of murdered and even the existence of gas chambers, insinuating that Auschwitz was an ordinary labour camp where inmates died of natural causes. Such and other questions are nowadays bandied around, while eyewitnesses still exist.

Auschwitz was a web of concentration camps and subcamps. The central one contained installations of torture, pseudo-medical experimentation and execution, but most of its inmates were exploited as slaves in nearby industrial complexes until their final collapse. On the other hand, Auschwitz-Birkenau, situated a couple of kilometres from the central camp, was used for mass …

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Publication information: Article title: 'Terror in the Soul': Remembering Auschwitz. Contributors: Luke, Tom - Author. Magazine title: UN Chronicle. Volume: 42. Issue: 1 Publication date: March-May 2005. Page number: 32+. © 1998 United Nations Publications. COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group.

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