In 1944, members of the Sonderkommando —the "special squads, " composed almost exclusively of Jewish prisoners, who ensured the smooth operation of the gas chambers and had firsthand knowledge of the ...extermination process—buried on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau a series of remarkable eyewitness accounts of Nazi genocide. This careful and penetrating study examines anew these "Scrolls of Auschwitz, " which were gradually recovered, in damaged and fragmentary form, in the years following the camp's liberation. It painstakingly reconstructs their historical context and textual content, revealing complex literary works that resist narrow moral judgment and engage difficult questions about the limits of testimony.
This paper considers how the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum is experienced by teenage visitors on organized visits with the Holocaust Educational Trust (UK). The findings presented are based on ...semi-structured interviews with twelve 17 year olds, exploring their emotional engagement with the sites and how they perceive and understand this emotional interaction. The findings suggest that young people experience their visit in a variety of ways, and that this is an incomplete and ongoing process in their learning. The paper raises a number of considerations for educators taking educational visits to the museum, to support pupils in their learning.
This article explores how inhabitants of the town of Oświęcim/Auschwitz discursively construct two memoryscapes. On the one hand, there is the 'living' Oświęcim, on the other hand there is the ...'dead' Auschwitz. Demarcations between the two are fluid and their meaning depends on the person who is defining and the audience addressed. Locals draw on these memoryscapes in creating mental borders within their physical living space, especially to create disinvolvement when it comes to the Auschwitz memoryscape. The findings are based on interviews with policy makers, data gathered in two Facebook groups of inhabitants, and participant observation among those inhabitants.
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