One would think that developing a resistance movement in such a place of destruction was absolutely impossible. And yet... Witold Pilecki, who was the only man to voluntarily enter this death factory on September 19, 1940, founded such a movement. His mission was twofold: to establish a resistance unit in the camp and to gather evidence to document the genocide taking place there. Both tasks were completed. After almost three years of living in hell, Pilecki successfully escaped the camp on April 26, 1943. He was sentenced to death and shot by communists in 1948; one of the motives behind this judicial murder was his knowledge about the less than heroic deeds of later prominent communist functionaries imprisoned in Auschwitz during the war.

The savage manner of the death of the prisoners and the tragic conditions of living of the few surviving ones can be seen in the exposition found in the two camps that both surprises with their simplicity and shocks with their meaning. One cannot fail to be overwhelmed by thousands of eyeglass frames, hundreds of kilograms of human hair and gold teeth pulled out of corpses - the only trace left of thousands of Jews from all over Europe.

The museum expositions are so drastic that persons under 14 years are not allowed to see them at all. Both exhibition centers are separated by a distance of about 3.5 km. Visiting one camp takes a minimum of 90 minutes.

In the information center in the Auschwitz I camp one can see a fifteen minute documentary movie from the liberation of the camp, as well as request the services of guides. By an act of the Polish parliament of July 2, 1947, the National Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was created on both preserved parts of the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. In 1979 both places were entered in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List.

Links

• Museum's website

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