Photo Gallery Preserving Memory at Auschwitz
Agnieszka Tanistra-Rózanowska holds the title of "head of the master plan for preservation" at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. The Auschwitz Museum would like to keep everything as authentic as possible, but that goal often collides with the reality of decaying buildings and artifacts.
Auschwitz prisoners sort through the belongings of Jewish arrivals as SS officers look on in this photo from May 1944. The camp memorial and museum still possesses some 3,800 suitcases, 5,000 toothbrushes and over 100,000 shoes left behind by prisoners murdered in the death camp. Preserving them is a monumental task.
Margrit Bormann, a 38-year-old conservator from Germany, works in the Conservation Laboratories at the memorial site. She cleans and preserves old suitcases using many of the same techniques used by art conservators.
The memorial would like to keep things as authentic as possible. But entropy has meant that even the camp's infamous barbed-wire has had to be replaced on several occasions. These signs reading "Halt! Stój!" have also been repainted.
When the Nazis abandoned the camp, they blew up the crematoria located there. Conservators are trying to maintain what is left of them, as seen here in the picture.
The wood structures at Birkenau are particularly difficult to preserve -- and they aren't even original camp structures. Most of the 200 wooden barracks were destroyed after the end of the war, but 22 were then reassembled using leftover pieces.
