© all photos on this page: Bernd Steuer, Ines Doberanzke

January 15th, 2010

65st anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp: ‘Gift of Remembrance’

News that travelled the world: the theft of the inscription above the entrance gate to Auschwitz Main Camp “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Sets You Free). It is now suspected that the theft was carried out on behalf of a right-wing extremist collector of Nazi memorabilia in Great Britain who ‘placed the order’ for ‘the goods’ from Poland via middlemen in the Swedish Nazi scene.

The inscription was a cynical lie, as all the prisoners knew and physically experienced day in day out. But what most of them didn’t realize was that the sign contained a subversive message: the survivor Tadeusz Szymanski told of a conversation he had some years after the liberation with another survivor who had been forced to work in the camp locksmith’s workshop. As he accompanied Mr Szymanski beneath the gate, he told him that when he and his camp comrades were ordered by the SS to weld the sign together, they had deliberately placed the ‘B’ in the word ‘Arbeit’ upside down. It was a sign of self-esteem and self-assertion in an environment where all vestiges of human rights had been eradicated.

In order to remember the significance of the place Auschwitz, to remember the victims and the causes, but also to honour the ability to remember, a gift that only humans possess, the International Auschwitz Committee is founding the “Gift of Remembrance” in 2010, 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. It is shaped in the form of the inverted ‘B’ above the entrance gate to Auschwitz: to B remembered.

The idea for the sculpture came from Michèle Déodat of France who has been involved with the work of the International Auschwitz Committee for many years. The sculpture itself was designed by the Berlin artist Lutz Brandt. Trainees from Volkswagen AG in Hanover are manufacturing the sculptures: for twenty years now the trainees from Volkswagen Coaching have been working together with Polish school students to preserve the Auschwitz Memorial, where they also talk with people who survived imprisonment in the camp.

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Trainees from Volkswagen AG in Hanover are manufacturing the sculptures

Christoph Heubner, Vice-President of the IAC, with Marvin Ochmann and Nils Kempert.

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