Roberto Castaldo We all know the film “La vita è bella”, by and with Roberto Benigni, which in 1999 won three Oscar awards: best actor (Roberto Benigni), best foreign film and best soundtrack. The soundtrack was written by Nicola Piovani and the song “La vita è bella” was subsequently resumed (with the addition of the text) by… Continua a leggere La vita è bella
“For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women and children, mainly Jews from various parts of Europe“. Here, through woods of southern Poland occupied by nazi army during WW2, beauty of the forests and ugliness of… Continua a leggere Memory makes us free
Text written by Primo Levi for the inauguration of the Italian memorial at Auschwitz, April 1980. The story of deportation and of the extermination camps, the story of this place, cannot be separated from the story of fascist tyrannies in Europe. It runs an unbroken connection from the first fires of trade union centres in… Continua a leggere Letter to visitor – Primo Levi
Auschwitz (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz), a name to which memories and feelings of terror, destruction and death are associated all over the world, was opened in 1940, in the town of Oswiecim, in south-western Poland occupied by the Nazis, and was initially only one of the thousands concentration camps scattered throughout Europe, dedicated to Polishes imprisonment. Auschwitz… Continua a leggere The history of Auschwitz
ARBEIT MACHT FREI, in Italian, ‘work makes you free’, is the motto that gave “welcome” to prisoners in the concentration camp. The phrase was inspired by the title of a novel (1872) written by the German writer Lorenz Diefenbach. It was in 1940 that the sign was placed at the entrance gate of the Auschwitz… Continua a leggere Auschwitz I camp’s signboard
WARNING Some of the following images are particularly hard and direct and might hurt your sensitivity. Despite the constant, indeed increasing, presence of revisionists and deniers, the concentration and extermination camps that were not completely destroyed by the Nazis are still full of objective, sometimes truly horrible, testimonies of the committed crimes. Here are some… Continua a leggere The evidence of the committed crimes
Those who visit Auschwitz I will certainly find themselves walking along a not very long -but almost endless- corridor, covered with photos of the prisoners’ faces. Most of these photos are of non-Jews because Jews were not photographed at the entrance, except for a few for propaganda (and no Italian Jews at all). It is… Continua a leggere Auschwitz’s eyes
In late 1939, the Nazis began experimenting poison gas to eliminate people with mental problems; Dissatisfied with the result, in June 1941 they experimented “gas vans”: sealed vans where gases were released. The prisoners renamed them “death trucks“, in fact they were used for the Jews’ extermination (before the gas chambers). This technique, however, did… Continua a leggere Gas chambers
When the Nazis solved the ‘’problem of mass extermination’’, adopting the use of gas chambers, another obstacle immediately appeared: the excessive number of corpses which were difficult to hide; therefore they decided to resolve the issue internally, in each field using crematorium ovens in order to cremate as quickly as possible reducing the corpse in… Continua a leggere Crematorium ovens
The wall of executions, also called “black wall” (the one you see has been rebuilt) was a wooden, sand wall at the end of a courtyard that separated blocks 10 and 11 of Auschwitz 1, used for the execution of prisoners. The blocks were masonry buildings that formed the central core of the camp. Most… Continua a leggere The Death Wall