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Anne Frank Center, Rosenthaler Strasse, Berlin, Germany

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Anne Frank Center, Rosenthaler Strasse, Berlin, Germany

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Anne Frank Center, Rosenthaler Strasse, Berlin, Germany

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The Moral Dilemma of Who Betrayed Anne Frank

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Portraits of Anne Frank at the Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam. Frank's family lived with other Jews in a secret annex at the house for two years during World War II, until someone told the Nazis of their hiding place. The identity of the informer has been a mystery for decades. (Peter Dejong/AP)

The Netherlands may have a reputation today as a tolerant, liberal country, but it was a particularly terrifying place to be a Jew under the Nazi occupation during World War II. By the end of the war, the Netherlands had the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe - 73 percent of its Jews were murdered, a far higher share than in France, Belgium, Denmark or even fascist Italy. Tens of thousands went into hiding, and about one-third of those were betrayed, then deported, imprisoned and subject to near-certain death.

Anne Frank is the most famous of those hidden Dutch Jews, and the question of who betrayed her and the seven others who vanished from an annexbehind a bookcase in her father's Amsterdam warehouse has remained an unfinished chapter in her ubiquitous diary. Now a new theory has emerged, vexing and disturbing, and with it the most wrenching of moral dilemmas: What happens when evil comes from within?

" The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation," by Rosemary Sullivan, was just released with a sophisticated marketing campaign that included a lengthy segment on "60 Minutes." The book follows the work of a years-long "cold case" investigation that employed law enforcement techniques and artificial intelligence to try to finger the culprit. Its conclusion, couched in expected qualifiers, was, as the sleuths put it, "shocking."

The investigators' best guess is that Arnold van den Bergh, a respected Jewish notary and businessman, betrayed his fellow Jews.

A Jew contributed to the Nazi genocide. A victim had become a criminal.

Perhaps unintentionally, perhaps not, the revelations in Sullivan's book have muddied the roiling waters of Holocaust remembrance, pulling Anne Frank's iconic story into what the Israeli scholar Rivka Brot calls "the gray zone," where good and evil are scrambled by extreme circumstances and true responsibility for horrific crimes is thus harder to assign.

How are we to judge van den Bergh? According to Sullivan's narrative, told largely through the perspective of Vince Pankoke, a retired FBI agent who led the investigative team, van den Bergh had a list of Jewish hiding places and surreptitiously leaked the information to the Nazi authorities, hoping to ensure that his own family was spared. (It worked. They were.) He did this, they assert, after other attempts to secure safety - including officially changing his identity to that of a non-Jew - failed. Van den Bergh might not even have known that the Franks were secretly living at Prinsengracht 263 along the canal. It may only have been an address to him, a random ticket to salvation.

Still, he must have known that exposing the hidden Jews would put their lives in mortal danger - and indeed, Otto Frank, Anne's father, was the only one to survive. If van den Bergh did deliver Jews to the Nazis, he disobeyed classic Jewish law when strictly applied. One is permitted to violate commandments to preserve one own's life or the life of another, says the Talmud, the repository of rabbinical law and teaching - except for three violations that are not allowed under any circumstances: idol worship, forbidden sexual relations and bloodshed.

Van den Bergh facilitated bloodshed.

"There clearly is a gray zone," Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and ordained rabbi, said in an interview. "This, however, is a red line. This is one of the three things you cannot do."

And yet Berenbaum's own scholarship shows that the Holocaust was replete with varying, heartbreaking interpretations of these moral values. The Jewish Councils created by the Nazis to control the Jewish population and implement Nazi decrees were often asked to draw up lists for deportation, placing the heads of councilsin the agonizing position of literally deciding who would live and who would die. As Berenbaum details in his book " The World Must Know," rabbis across Nazi-occupied lands who advised the councils' leaders relied on the same texts and the same inherited wisdom, but they often issuedopposing directives.

In the Kovno ghetto in central Lithuania, the rabbi reluctantly told the leaders to draw up a list and save as many lives as possible, even though many others would be sacrificed. In Lithuania's Vilna ghetto, the rabbi came to the opposite conclusion. (The council leaders ignored him.) In the ghetto at Bereza Kartuska in then-occupied Poland, the entire Jewish Council took their own lives rather than participate in deportation. These were, to use a term coined by the scholar Lawrence Langer, "choiceless choices."

Journalist and historianAnne Applebaum has written eloquently on the decisions of collaborators and dissenters within authoritarian societies. Her observations could well apply to Jews forced to make choiceless choices during the Holocaust. "The personal, the political, the intellectual, and the historical combine differently within every human brain, and the outcomes can be unpredictable," she observed in the Atlantic in 2020.

If van den Bergh did decide to surrender other Jewish lives in the expectation - or desperate hope - that he would preserve his own, his choicecan be seen not on one side of a bright red line but inside that excruciating gray zone that Brot explicates.

"The reality of the mass atrocities and the prolonged rule of terror blurred the boundary between victim and perpetrator," Brot told Haaretz in 2019, "and thereby created a distinctive type of victim. These were 'complex victims,' which means individuals who were victims of a system of oppression and violence but at the same time harmed other victims."

What does it mean, then, to name van den Bergh - who died of cancer in 1950 - as the likely betrayer of the most well-known Jewish face of the Holocaust? In the closing pages of her book, Sullivan acknowledges that the cold-case team members were worried about sharing their revelations with the world, knowing how powerful and upsetting they would be. She hastens to say that van den Bergh was "not ultimately responsible" for the deaths of the residents of Prinsengracht 263.

"He did not turn over information out of wickedness or for self-enrichment, as so many others had. Like Otto Frank's, his goal was simple: to save his family. That he succeeded while Otto failed is a terrible fact of history," she writes.

But the team members' responsibility is deeper than they acknowledge. In the days following their shocking revelation, scholars have questioned the evidence backing up their findings - in particular the key assertion that van den Bergh, as a onetime member of the Jewish Council in Amsterdam - would have been privy to a list of hidden Jews.

"No one had lists of hidden Jews, except for some organizations that hid children," Berenbaum explained. "It was dangerous enough that Jewish organizations had membership lists which could be confiscated. All hiding would have been coded, if it existed at all - too dangerous to have it any other way."

With so fundamental a question hanging over this investigation, was it fair not only to van den Bergh and his family, but to other living Jews, to trumpet Jewish complicity in the Holocaust? According to the book, Otto Frank himself was said to have known of van den Bergh's name and kept it a secret for fear of stoking more antisemitism. After the book's revelations were made public, the Daily Mail in Britain ran a headline that began: "Anne Frank was betrayed by a JEWISH notary."

"We have to ask: Why has this become so sensationalized?" Erica Brown, vice provost at Yeshiva University, said in an interview. "We are saturated with information about the Holocaust. This is getting attention because it feeds into an impulse to exonerate the criminals and put blame on the victims."

She added: "I am deeply disturbed by the rush to judgment and the almost decontextualization of the circumstances. Hold up a mirror. Who would I have been in this situation? Could I soften my judgment - not remove it, but soften it?"

Brown's mother and grandparents survived the Holocaust, and to do so they may have had to make excruciating ethical and moral decisions. If it were her, she said, "I want to believe that I would not turn in another family. But in my heart of hearts, can I say that I would not do anything to save my life and the life of my family? I could not."

Neither, perhaps, could Arnold van den Bergh.
Jane Eisner, a regular Book World contributor, is the director of academic affairs at the Columbia Journalism School. She is writing a book about Carole King.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank
A Cold Case Investigation
By Rosemary Sullivan

Harper. 383 pp. $29.99

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Perspective | Searching for Anne Frank's betrayer, finding a moral dilemma

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The Netherlands may have a reputation today as a tolerant, liberal country, but it was a particularly terrifying place to be a Jew under the Nazi occupation during World War II.

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Forgiveness in Canada: A Genocide Forgotten

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VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis on Friday made a historic apology to Indigenous peoples for the "deplorable" abuses they suffered in Canada's Catholic-run residential schools and said he hoped to visit Canada in late July to deliver the apology in person to survivors of the church's misguided missionary zeal.

Francis begged forgiveness during an audience with dozens of members of the Metis, Inuit and First Nations communities who came to Rome seeking a papal apology and a commitment from the Catholic Church to repair the damage. The first pope from the Americas said he hoped to visit Canada around the Feast of St. Anna, which falls on July 26.

More than 150,000 native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes and culture. The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior.

The Canadian government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse was rampant at the schools, with students beaten for speaking their native languages. That legacy of that abuse and isolation from family has been cited by Indigenous leaders as a root cause of the epidemic rates of alcohol and drug addiction now on Canadian reservations.

After hearing their stories all week, Francis told the Indigenous groups that the colonial project ripped children from their families, cutting off their roots, traditions and culture and provoking inter-generational trauma that is still being felt today. He said it was a "counter-witness" to the same Gospel that the residential school system purported to uphold.

"For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church, I ask forgiveness of the Lord," Francis said. "And I want to tell you from my heart, that I am greatly pained. And I unite myself with the Canadian bishops in apologizing."

The trip to Rome by the Indigenous leaders, elders and survivors was years in the making but gained momentum last year after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves outside some of the residential schools in Canada. The three groups met separately with Francis over several hours this week, telling him their stories, culminating with Friday's audience.

The president of the Metis National Council, Cassidy Caron, said the Metis elder sitting next her burst into tears upon hearing what she said was a long-overdue apology.

"The pope's words today were historic, to be sure. They were necessary, and I appreciate them deeply," Caron told reporters in St. Peter's Square. "And I now look forward to the pope's visit to Canada, where he can offer those sincere words of apology directly to our survivors and their families, whose acceptance and healing ultimately matters most."

First Nations' Chief Gerald Antoine echoed the sentiment, saying Francis recognized the cultural "genocide" that had been inflicted on Indigenous peoples.

"Today is a day that we've been waiting for. And certainly one that will be uplifted in our history," he said. "It's a historical first step, however, only a first step."

He and other delegates said there was far more for the church to do on the path of reconciliation, but that for now Indigenous leaders insisted on being involved in organizing the papal visit to make sure Francis stops in places that hold spiritual importance to their people.

Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, thanked Francis for addressing all the issues the Indigenous delegations had brought to him. "And he did so in a way that really showed his empathy towards the Indigenous people of Canada," he said.

Nearly three-quarters of Canada's 130 residential schools were run by Catholic missionary congregations.

Last May, the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced the discovery of 215 gravesites near Kamloops, British Columbia, that were found using ground-penetrating radar. It was Canada's largest Indigenous residential school and the discovery of the graves was the first of numerous, similar grim sites across the country.

Even before the grave sites were discovered, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission specifically called for a papal apology to be delivered on Canadian soil for the church's role in the abuses.

In addition, as part of a settlement of a lawsuit involving the Canadian government, churches and the approximately 90,000 surviving students, Canada paid reparations that amounted to billions of dollars being transferred to Indigenous communities. The Catholic Church, for its part, has paid over $50 million and now intends to add $30 million more over the next five years.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, acknowledged Francis' apology and said he looked forward to having him deliver it in person in Canada.

"This apology would not have happened without the long advocacy of survivors who journeyed to tell their truths directly to the institution responsible and who recounted and relived their painful memories," he said. "Today's apology is a step forward in acknowledging the truth of our past in order to right historical wrongs, but there is still work to be done."

Francis said he felt shame for the role that Catholic educators had played in the harm, "in the abuse and disrespect for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values," he said. "It is evident that the contents of the faith cannot be transmitted in a way that is extraneous to the faith itself."

"It is chilling to think of determined efforts to instill a sense of inferiority, to rob people of their cultural identity, to sever their roots, and to consider all the personal and social effects that this continues to entail: unresolved traumas that have become inter-generational traumas," he said.

After the papal apology, the audience continued with joyous performances of Indigenous prayers by drummers, dancers and fiddlers that Francis watched, applauded and gave a thumbs up to. The delegates then presented him with gifts, including snowshoes. Francis, for his part, returned a First Nations cradle that the delegation had left with him overnight as he pondered his apology.

Francis' apology went far beyond what Pope Benedict XVI had offered in 2009 when an Assembly of First Nations delegation visited. At the time, Benedict only expressed his "sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the church." But he did not apologize.

The Argentine pope is no stranger to offering apologies for his own errors and for what he himself has termed the "crimes" of the institutional church. Most significantly, during a 2015 visit to Bolivia, he apologized for the sins, crimes and offenses committed by the church against Indigenous peoples during the colonial-era conquest of the Americas.

He made clear those same colonial crimes occurred far more recently in Canada at the Catholic-run residential schools.

"Your identity and culture has been wounded, many families separated, many children have become victims of this homogenization action, supported by the idea that progress occurs through ideological colonization, according to programs studied at the table rather than respecting the lives of peoples," he said.

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This version corrects name of First Nations chief to Gerald Antoine.

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Pope makes historic Indigenous apology for Canada abuses

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VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Francis on Friday made a historic apology to Indigenous peoples for the "deplorable" abuses they suffered in Canada's Catholic-run residential schools and said he hoped to visit Canada in late July to deliver the apology in person to survivors of the church's misguided missionary zeal.

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Kindertransport in a 21st Century Genocide

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THE HAGUE, June 3 (Reuters) - Prosecutors investigating war crimes cases in Ukraine are examining allegations of the forcible deportation of children to Russia since the invasion as they seek to build a genocide indictment, the country's top prosecutor said in an interview.

International humanitarian law classifies the forced mass deportation of people during a conflict as a war crime. "Forcibly transfering children" in particular qualifies as genocide, the most serious of war crimes, under the 1948 Genocide Convention that outlawed the intent to destroy - in whole or in part - a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova, who is overseeing multiple war crimes inquiries in Ukraine, said "we have more than 20 cases about forcible transfer of people" to Russia from various regions across the eastern European country since the invasion began on Feb. 24.

"From the first days of the war, we started this case about genocide," Venediktova told Reuters. She said that, amid the chaos and destruction wrought by Russia's assault, focusing on the removal of children offered the best way to secure the evidence needed to meet the rigorous legal definition of genocide: "That's why this forcible transfer of children is very important for us."

Venediktova declined to provide a number for how many victims had been forcibly transferred. However, Ukraine's human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova said in mid May that Russia had relocated more than 210,000 children during the conflict, part of more than 1.2 million Ukrainians who Kyiv said have been deported against their will.

A Kremlin spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on Venediktova's remarks nor the figures on Ukrainians on Russian soil. Russia in the past has said that it is offering humanitarian aid to those wishing to flee Ukraine voluntarily.

Russia's TASS state news agency on Monday quoted an unnamed law enforcement official as saying that "more than 1.55 million people who arrived from the territory of Ukraine and Donbas have crossed the border with the Russian Federation. Among them, more than 254,000 children."

Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation" to disarm Ukraine and protect it from fascists. Ukraine and the West say the fascist allegation is baseless and that the war is an unprovoked act of aggression.

The Genocide Convention - a treaty adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust - specifies five acts that could each constitute the crime, if committed with genocidal intent: killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.

Venediktova said the investigations to build a genocide case - covering the forced deportation of children and other acts - were targeting areas from northern Ukraine down to Mykolaiv and Kherson on the southern coast. But the gathering of evidence was being complicated by the war, she said.

"To this day we don't have access to territory. We don't have access to people who we can ask, who we can interview," she said. "We are waiting when this territory will be de-occupied."

Aside from genocide, other alleged war crimes are being examined in the regions of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Sumy and Zhytomyr, the prosecutor general's office said. Officials in Ukraine have said they are investigating the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, rape, torture, and extra-judicial killings by Russian forces.

Venediktova said Ukraine had identified more than 600 Russian war crimes suspects and had already begun prosecutions against around 80 of them, a small number of whom are being held as prisoners of war. read more She did not say if any of them were being targeted for forced deportations.

Russia has strongly denied that its forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine and has in turn accused Ukrainian troops of atrocities, including mistreatment of prisoners of war. Kyiv has said allegations of abuse will be investigated.

MOUNTING EVIDENCE

The legal bar for establishing genocide is high, legal experts say, and it has only been proven in international courts for three conflicts - Bosnia, Rwanda and Cambodia - since it was cemented in humanitarian law. read more

However, some legal scholars have said there is mounting evidence to support a genocide case in Ukraine against Russian perpetrators, including a pattern of atrocities that can help meet the rigorous standard required to prove a specific genocidal intent.

A report this week by the Washington-based Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, which cited more than 30 legal experts, said that the large scale forcible transfer of children to Russia or Russian-controlled areas could support a genocide case.

"They should absolutely focus on the forcible transfer of children. It's the strongest evidence in this particular situation," Melanie O'Brien, associate professor of the University of Western Australia and president of the international association of genocide scholars, told Reuters.

"We definitely see a risk of genocide in this situation," she added.

A spokeswoman in Geneva for the U.N. child agency UNICEF said it had been unable to access the area near the border with Russia and had not been able to verify any reports of forced deportation of children from Ukraine.

Venediktova said Ukraine's genocide investigation would count on the help of international war crimes experts being recruited to form mobile justice teams that will facilitate the collection of evidence. She said that any perpetrators should then be tried at the International Criminal Court, the world's permanent war crimes tribunal.

Officials in Ukraine have said its courts will be working at full capacity to handle possibly hundreds of war crimes cases and the idea is to pass the bigger ones to the ICC. The international tribunal has experts with experience in prosecuting such complex cases and has a remit to step in when national legal systems need assistance.

Venediktova spoke after meeting in The Hague on Tuesday with the ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Any decision on whether to proceed with a prosecution on genocide charges or other war crimes before the international tribunal would fall to Khan.

"We are aware of the allegations and the reports of deportations including children and we will make sure to the best of our ability to collect evidence that can be assessed or judged in due course," Khan told Reuters last month.

A spokesperson for the ICC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on genocide investigations by Ukraine.

The ICC opened its own war crimes investigation in Ukraine in early March, but Khan on Tuesday declined to go into detail about which crimes his office would be examining. It has sent 42 experts, prosecutors and staff to Ukraine and plans to open an office in Kyiv, he said.

British attorney Wayne Jordash - co-lead of the Atrocity Crimes Unit, a mechanism created by the United States, Britain and the European Union in May to coordinate and provide expertise to Ukraine's war crimes investigations - said the mobile justice teams should be ready to start their work by mid-June.

Asked about the efforts to bring a genocide case based on forced deportations, Jordash said: "The evidence that it is happening in different places is increasingly strong. The precise nature of it is not yet clear." He did not provide further details.

War crimes in Ukraine are the focus of domestic investigations and are also being looked into by 18 nations applying so-called universal jurisdiction, which allows the most serious international offences to be prosecuted anywhere.

Local Ukrainian courts have already held two war crimes trials, sentencing three captured Russian soldiers to prison terms ranging from 11 and a half years to life. read more

Reporting by Anthony Deutsch and Stephanie van den Berg; Editing by Daniel Flynn

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Exclusive: Ukraine probes deportation of children to Russia as possible genocide

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THE HAGUE, June 3 (Reuters) - Prosecutors investigating war crimes cases in Ukraine are examining allegations of the forcible deportation of children to Russia since the invasion as they seek to build a genocide indictment, the country's top prosecutor said in an interview.

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Happening Again, Happening Now: The Modern-Day Crematorium

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The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium at its notorious Sednaya military prison near Damascus to clandestinely dispose of the bodies of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, the State Department said Monday.

Thousands of executed detainees have been dumped in mass graves in recent years, said acting assistant secretary of state Stuart Jones. "What we're assessing is that if you have that level of production of mass murder, then using the crematorium would . . . allow the regime to manage that number of corpses . . . without evidence."

"We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison," he said in a briefing for reporters.

The Syrian regime, Jones said, "has treated opposition forces and unarmed civilians as one and the same," continuing to "systematically abduct and torture civilian detainees, often beating, electrocuting and raping these victims," and authorizing "the extrajudicial killings of thousands."

The State Department distributed satellite photographs it said documented the gradual construction of the facility outside the main prison complex and its apparent use this year. Jones said that "newly declassified" information on this and other atrocities by the government of President Bashar al-Assad came from "intelligence community assessments," as well as from nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and the media.

"These atrocities have been carried out seemingly with the unconditional support from Russia and Iran," Assad's main backers, Jones said. Neither government commented on the new U.S. allegation.

[How a woman in England tracks civilian deaths in Syria, one bomb at a time]

Accusations of mass murder and incinerated bodies, evoking the Holocaust, contrasted with last week's Washington visit by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. They were pictured shaking hands and broadly smiling with President Trump before an Oval Office meeting in which discussions centered on Syria.

The Russians also met with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Jones said the release of new intelligence comes at "an opportune time to remind people about the atrocities that are being carried out inside of Syria all the time."

The newly released information included a satellite photo of the snow-covered Sednaya complex with an L-shaped building labeled "probable crematorium." Assessment of the facility, Jones said, included the presence of "the discharge stack, the probable firewall, the probable air intake - this is in the construction phase - this would be consistent if they were building a crematorium." In a photo taken Jan. 15, he said, "we're look[ing] at snowmelt on the roof that would be consistent with a crematorium."

Jones said the information had not been shared with the Russians. He also said he was not suggesting that either Russia or Iran was involved with the facility.

But Tillerson, he said, "was firm and clear with Minister Lavrov. Russia holds tremendous influence over Bashar al-Assad. A key point that took place in that bilateral meeting was telling Russia to use its power to rein in the regime."

"The regime must stop all attacks on civilians and opposition forces, and Russia must bear responsibility to ensure regime compliance," Jones said.

Jones called Tillerson's meeting with Lavrov "productive." But "I would not say that they mapped out a specific way forward on how to address the issue of Syrian atrocities, or even how to move forward on the Geneva process" on the eve of the next round of years-long United Nations efforts to bring representatives of Assad and the rebels to the negotiating table, due to begin Tuesday.

One of Lavrov's principal goals in last week's meetings was to solicit Trump administration support for a cease-fire and the establishment of safe zones within Syria as part of a May 4 pact signed by Russia, Iran and Turkey. The Turkish government has backed anti-Assad rebels in Syria along with the United States, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due to meet with Trump at the White House on Tuesday.

[U.S.-Turkish relations deeply strained ahead of Erdogan's visit to White House]

Although Trump has also called for safe zones within Syria and said he discussed them early this month in a telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the administration more recently has been publicly lukewarm about the Russia-led plan.

"In light of the failures of the past cease-fire agreements, we have reason to be skeptical," Jones said. Earlier truces negotiated under the Obama administration were violated by both Syria and Russia.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump said the United States should concentrate on the fight against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and cease involvement in Syria's civil war. But he changed course last month, approving a cruise missile strike on a Syrian government air base after concluding it was used by Assad to launch a chemical weapons attack against civilians.

Jones described "the continued brutality of Assad" as a threat to the region, "as well as to the national security interests of the United States and our allies." Asked if there is consideration of military action to destroy the crematorium, he said, "We're not going to signal what we are going to do and what we're not going to do."

"At this point, we are talking about this evidence and bringing it forward to the international community, which we hope will put pressure on the regime to change its behavior," Jones said.

Cease-fires under the Russia-Iran-Turkey agreement, in designated parts of northwestern, central and southern Syria, have largely held in recent weeks. But violence continues on other fronts not included in the plan, and suggests that Assad's forces are positioning themselves to launch an all-out assault on the largest of the safe zones, Idlib province, when the deal breaks down. If that happens, almost a million displaced civilians could find themselves caught in the crossfire between pro-government forces and an al-Qaeda-linked coalition that appears willing to fight until the end.

More than 400,000 people have died in the Syrian civil war, according to the United Nations, with at least half the entire prewar population of about 22 million now living as refugees or displaced from their homes. Many of the dead are civilians killed by government action, including, Jones said, "well-documented airstrikes and artillery strikes, chemical weapons attacks, arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, starvation, sexual violence, and denial of essential services such as food, water and medical care."

According to "numerous" nongovernmental organizations, Jones said, "the regime has abducted and detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people between 2011 and 2015," a period in which Amnesty International has said that nearly 18,000 detainees died. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated in March that at least 106,727 people were still arrested or had been forcibly disappeared.

Prisoners are held in a network of prisons across Syria. The Sednaya detention complex, run by Syria's powerful military police about 20 miles outside Damascus, is the most notorious. A recent Amnesty International report described it as a "human slaughterhouse."

Jones cited "multiple sources" in saying that "the regime is responsible for killing as many as 50 detainees per day at Sednaya," where he said up to 70 people were packed in cells designed for five. Former prisoners have described mass hangings.

[A journey into Syria's secret torture wards]

In interviews with The Washington Post, former detainees described conditions so atrocious that many prisoners died from torture, medical neglect or starvation.

Most political prisoners said they had been held in the "Red Building," a facility the regime largely emptied of mostly Islamist and jihadist prisoners in the early months of the anti-Assad uprising that began in early 2011. Among those taken from the cells and hanged, former prisoners said, were students, engineers, activists and human rights lawyers.

Louisa Loveluck in Beirut contributed to this report.

Read more:

How a woman in England tracks civilian deaths in Syria, one bomb at a time

He says he went to Syria to rescue his wife from ISIS. Now he sits in prison.

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U.S. says Syria built crematorium to handle mass prisoner killings

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The Syrian government has constructed and is using a crematorium at its notorious Sednaya military prison near Damascus to clandestinely dispose of the bodies of prisoners it continues to execute inside the facility, the State Department said Monday. Thousands of executed detainees have been dumped in mass graves in recent years, said acting assistant secretary of state Stuart Jones.

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The Dwindling Survivors - "Still Remember"

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Holocaust survivor Rose Rosenthal was a child when she and her mother escaped Nazi-occupied France by gaining passage on a ship to Baltimore. It was July 1942, just six months after Nazi officials finalized their plan to exterminate Europe's Jews known as the "Final Solution."

For Rosenthal, the year 1942 marked a harrowing escape and the beginning of a new life in America. But for millions of others, it was a death sentence - a fact the 93-year old has never forgotten.

"We were very lucky," she said Sunday, one of Houston's dwindling number of Holocaust survivors who gathered at Congregation Beth Israel to mourn the 6 million people killed by the Nazi regime during World War II.

Organizers of Houston's Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance ceremony, selected 1942 as their theme to highlight the pivotal year when the Nazis codified their deadly plan.

Fewer than 80 Holocaust survivors are thought to remain in Houston. Holocaust Museum Houston, an institution dedicated to bringing awareness to the dangers of hatred, prejudice and apathy, hosts the annual remembrance ceremony to mourn the Nazis' victims and celebrate the strength of those who survived.

Because of the pandemic, Sunday was the first time since 2019 that survivors could share their stories in person. Hundreds attended to listen, mourn and light candles for all those who were lost.

For Bill Orlin, the ceremony was an opportunity to reflect on his life's unlikely path. Born in 1932 to a Jewish family in Poland, Orlin and his family were expelled from their village at the outset of the war.

Orlin's circuitous route to America took him from Uzbekistan, to Ukraine, and finally to a displaced persons camp in Germany, before he and his family were granted asylum in Canada, later landing in Houston in 1951. Within months, as a 19-year old, was drafted in to the Army and shipped off to Germany in a tank division.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I would come back to Germany as a G.I. in 1951," Orlin said Sunday.

Reflecting on the oddities of fate, Orlin said his life's motto is a simple one: Forgive, but never forget. He does not resent the children and grandchildren of those who perpetrated the Holocaust, he said, but he wants to ensure its atrocities are not relegated to history.

His sentiments come at a time of rising anti-Semitism, with attacks, harassment and vandalism against Jewish people at record highs, according to data from the Anti-Defamation League.

"I want people to know the Holocaust happened," Orlin said. "It happened. I was there."

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Houston's dwindling Holocaust survivors gather to mark remembrance ceremony

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Holocaust survivor Rose Rosenthal was a child when she and her mother escaped Nazi-occupied France by gaining passage on a ship to Baltimore. It was July 1942, just six months after Nazi officials finalized their plan to exterminate Europe's Jews known as the "Final Solution."

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Statement for Action on 25th Anniversary of Rwandan Genocide

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The genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994. Warnings of impending genocide went largely unheeded and within 100 days up to one million Rwandans, primarily Tutsis, were killed.

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New Study: Can PTSD Linger After an Atrocity?

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Study finds PTSD effects may linger in body chemistry of next generation

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Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA

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Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA

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Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, Woodland Road, Pittsburgh, PA

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Technology as Preservation Method for Holocaust Remembrance

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Preserving the Truth in Auschwitz

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WARSAW, Poland - Among the artifacts at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, at the site of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps of World War II, are 110,000 shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 246 tallits (Jewish prayer shawls), 8,000 letters from prisoners and reams of documents from the SS, Adolf Hitler's terrifying paramilitary force.

The sheer size of the archive that documents how 1.1 million people perished there during the Holocaust forces the museum's keepers to at least try to distance themselves emotionally from their work.

"We usually treat these buildings or blocks just like we would treat any other preservation objects," says Agnieszka Tanistra, acting head of the museum's preservation department. "It's a job to be done."

Yet even seven decades after the camps were liberated by Soviet troops, it's still impossible to fully maintain that distance.

"Suddenly a moment comes when we see a drawing or paint on the wall, and we start thinking of those prisoners who made them," Tanistra says. "Or we discover a new object. These days it happens rarely. But just a few years ago, during the conservation of a pair of shoes, we found a piece of paper hidden in it, which turned out to be a kid's math test."

Tanistra and about 60 other preservationists also strive to strike a balance between the museum's goal of preserving the authenticity of the camps for visitors and preventing the natural deterioration of structures that weren't built to last.

"Barracks were meant to be just temporary," she says. "Everyday personal things such as toothbrushes or shoes were never meant to last over 70 years. And we must fight to make them exist for generations to come."

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and nearby Birkenau near Krakow in south-central Poland in January 1945. Some of the camps' facilities were devoted exclusively to killing Jews according to the Nazis' genocidal "final solution." Others housed Poles, Russians, Roma, political prisoners, gays and slave laborers for a nearby chemical factory.

After liberation, the camps and the dusty, poor town nearby fell into neglect and disrepair as the region became the Soviet-controlled East Bloc. In the late 1980s, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex offered nothing to accommodate visitors - not even documentation of what had happened there - and visitors were few.

That changed after the ouster of Poland's Soviet-backed communist government in 1989. Money flowed in, visitors began to come in greater numbers and preservation efforts increased.

Within the worldwide community of Holocaust scholars, some wonder whether the preservation efforts are worth it. At great expense and effort, the museum has transformed a horrible place into a popular tourist destination. They question whether visitors can understand the depth of the suffering that occurred there.

"Is there a case for abandoning the site and letting nature take its course?" says Robert Jan Van Pelt, an architectural historian and Holocaust scholar at the University of Waterloo in Canada. "There is, and there isn't. I continue to argue with myself on that."

Museum officials believe the effort to remember is what matters. As the last survivors of Auschwitz and Birkenau die, the museum recounts their experiences for the tens of thousands of visitors who pass through the camps every week.

"Preserving Auschwitz is key to paying respect to all the people who went through the camp - those who died there but also those who survived," Tanistra says. "Moreover, in abandoning the site, we will lose history to the Holocaust deniers."

Museum director Piotr Cywiński adds: "Deniers are people of bad will, and no document or object would convince them otherwise. The museum is important for people of good will who want to try to understand what happened. It is easier for them to answer that question when they see the place."

However, Cywiński and Tanistra have decided not to preserve one collection in the museum: the pile of human hair that weighs more than 4,400 pounds.

Some relatives of camp victims have said the hair should be buried out of respect for the dead. But museum officials decided the grisly exhibit should stay. It is temporary, after all. Today, the individual strands have lost their color and shape. Someday, they will decompose entirely and be gone forever.

"The hair is connected to the place. We do not know which parts of it belonged to survivors and which to those who died," Cywiński says. "It is one of the most important evidence of the crimes committed by the Nazis. The hair will be displayed as long as it does not completely fall apart."

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WWII 70 years later: Preserving the truth at Auschwitz

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WARSAW, Poland - Among the artifacts at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, at the site of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps of World War II, are 110,000 shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 246 tallits (Jewish prayer shawls), 8,000 letters from prisoners and reams of documents from the SS, Adolf Hitler's terrifying paramilitary force.

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Can Auschwitz Be Saved?
Should It?

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Liberated in 1945, the Nazi concentration camp is one of Eastern Europe's most visited sites-and most fragile

Smithsonian Magazine |

Everyone who visits Auschwitz remembers the hair: almost two tons of it, piled behind glass in mounds taller than a person. When I first visited the camp, in 1991, the hair was still black and brown, red and blond, gray and white-emotionally overwhelming evidence of the lives extinguished there.

When I returned this past autumn, the hair was a barely differentiated mass of gray, more like wool than human locks. Only the occasional braid signaled the remnants of something unprecedented and awful-the site where the Third Reich perpetrated the largest mass murder in human history. At least 1.1 million people were killed here, most within hours of their arrival.

This January 27 marks the 65th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by Soviet soldiers. The Nazis operated the camp between May 1940 and January 1945-and since 1947, the Polish government has maintained Auschwitz, which lies about 40 miles west of Krakow, as a museum and memorial. It is a Unesco World Heritage site, a distinction usually reserved for places of culture and beauty.

But Auschwitz-with its 155 buildings and hundreds of thousands of artifacts-is deteriorating. It is a conservation challenge like no other. "Our main problem is sheer numbers," Jolanta Banas, the head of preservation, tells me as we walk through the white-tiled facility where she and her 48-member staff work. "We measure shoes in the ten thousands."

Banas introduces me to conservators working to preserve evidence of camp life: fragments of a mural depicting an idealized German family that once decorated the SS canteen, floor tiles from a prisoners barrack. In one room, a team wielding erasers, brushes and purified water clean and scan 39,000 yellowing medical records written on everything from card stock to toilet paper.

The Auschwitz camp itself covers 50 acres and comprises 46 historical buildings, including two-story red brick barracks, a kitchen, a crematorium and several brick and concrete administration buildings. In addition, Birkenau, a satellite camp about two miles away, sprawls over more than 400 acres and has 30 low-slung brick barracks and 20 wooden structures, railroad tracks and the remains of four gas chambers and crematoria. In total, Banas and her staff monitor 150 buildings and more than 300 ruins at the two sites.

Banas says dozens of barracks have cracked walls and sinking foundations, many in such sad shape they're closed for safety reasons. Water from leaking roofs has damaged wood bunks where prisoners once slept.

At the same time, public interest in the camp has never been higher. Visits have doubled this decade, from 492,500 in 2001 to more than 1 million in 2009. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, Krakow has become a popular destination for foreign tourists, and Auschwitz is a must stop on many itineraries. A visit is also part of education programs in Israel, Britain and other countries. On peak days, as many as 30,000 visitors file through the camp's buildings.

The Polish government in 2009 asked European nations, the United States and Israel to contribute to a fund from which the Auschwitz museum could draw $6 million to $7 million a year for restoration projects, on top of its more than $10 million annual operating budget. Last December, the German government pledged $87 million-about half of the $170 million target endowment. (Auschwitz officials had not received a U.S. pledge by the time this magazine went to press.)

"Auschwitz is a place of memory, but it's not just about history-it's also about the future," says the museum's director, Piotr Cywinski, a hulking man with a thick red beard and a doctorate in medieval history. "This is the most important conservation project since the end of the war."

Until 1990, the museum's directors were all former prisoners. Cywinski is just 37. His office is on the first floor of a former SS administration building directly across from a former gas chamber and crematorium. He tells me that Auschwitz is about to slip into history. The last survivors will soon die, and with them the living links to what happened here. Preserving the site becomes increasingly important, Cywinski believes: younger generations raised on TV and movie special effects need to see and touch the real thing.

But the effort to preserve the site is not without its critics. One is Robert Jan van Pelt, a cultural historian in the school of architecture at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the leading expert on the construction of Auschwitz. He supports the preservation of the Auschwitz main camp, although he acknowledges it is a "kind of theme park, cleaned up for tourists." In any event, it's a fully equipped museum, complete with exhibits and conservation facilities, where most of the original buildings still stand. But van Pelt views the Birkenau site in a different light. For one thing, 80 to 90 percent of the original structures are gone or in a state of ruin. Most important, it's where most of the killings took place, so it is a core site of the Holocaust itself. He says letting Birkenau disintegrate completely would be a more fitting memorial than constantly repairing the scant remains. Birkenau is "the ultimate nihilistic place. A million people literally disappeared. Shouldn't we confront people with the nothingness of the place? Seal it up. Don't give people a sense that they can imitate the experience and walk in the steps of the people who were there."

Realistically, the Polish government and the proponents of preserving Auschwitz are not about to abandon the place, but at times during my visit I had some appreciation for van Pelt's perspective. I arrived on the September day the camp counted its millionth visitor of the year. Cellphone-wielding visitors snapped pictures of the sign at the main gate, Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free). Tour group members wearing headphones stood shoulder to shoulder with their guides speaking into wireless microphones.

At the Birkenau camp, a five-minute shuttle-bus ride from the Auschwitz visitor center, the scene was so peaceful it was almost impossible to imagine the sea of stinking mud that survivors describe. The vast expanse was covered in neatly mowed grass. Flocks of Israeli teenagers in matching white-and-blue hoodies wandered from ruin to ruin. As I stood at the stairs leading down into the ruined gas chambers, a dozen Brits posed for a group picture on the steps of a memorial just a few yards away.

Mindful that no mere visit can convey what the concentration camp was like when the Nazis ran it, I met with survivors. The week before I arrived in Krakow, I had called Jozef Stos, 89, to ask if he would discuss his years in captivity. "If I'm still alive then, sure-it's my civic responsibility," he said with a laugh. "But I'm pretty darn old, you know."

Early one morning I met Stos, a retired architect, at his small first-floor apartment on the outskirts of Krakow. We sat in his small, dark dining room, a plate of jam-filled ginger cookies on the starched white tablecloth between us. He said he grew up in Tarnow, Poland, about 50 miles from Krakow. He remembers the day the Nazis shipped him off to Auschwitz: June 13, 1940. It had been almost a year since Germany invaded Poland and launched its campaign to destroy the nation. Following instructions issued by SS chief Reinhard Heydrich-"the leading strata of the population should be rendered harmless"-the SS killed some 20,000 Poles, mainly priests, politicians and academics, in September and October 1939. Stos was an 18-year-old Boy Scout and a member of a Catholic youth organization. Germans put him and 727 other Poles, mostly university and trade-school students, in first-class train cars and told them they were going to work on German farms.

The train wasn't headed to Germany. Stos was on the first transport of Polish prisoners to Auschwitz. There to greet them were 30 hardened German convicts, brought by the SS from a prison near Berlin. Guards confiscated Stos' belongings and issued him a number. Sixty-nine years later, he slid a business card across the dining room table as his daughter brought us cups of tea. It read "Jozef Stos, former Auschwitz Concentration Camp Prisoner No. 752." "I was there on the first day," he said. "They had me for five years and five days."

The camp Stos first saw, some 20 brick buildings, was a run-down former Polish artillery barrack the Nazis had taken over a few months before. Many Poles followed Stos to Auschwitz; few were as lucky. In its original incarnation as a concentration camp, Auschwitz was designed to work inmates to death. At first, most of the labor helped expand the camp itself; other work, such as gravel mining and farming, earned money for the SS. The Nazis even had a term for it, Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("Destruction through work"). The notorious SS camp supervisor Karl Fritzsch greeted new arrivals with a speech: "You have arrived here not at a sanatorium, but at a German concentration camp, from which the only exit is through the chimney of its crematorium."

Prisoners were crammed into the crumbling barracks and provided only a few hundred calories a day. Most died of starvation, exhaustion and diseases such as typhus and dysentery. Beatings, torture and executions were commonplace. Camp doctors conducted experiments-usually fatal-on prisoners, looking for ways to sterilize women with radiation or toxic chemicals, and studying the effects of extreme cold or starvation on the human body. In the first few years of the camp, 80 percent of new inmates died within two months.

Stos said he survived by making himself useful. Prisoners had a better chance of staying alive if they worked under a roof-in a kitchen or an administration building-or had a skill, such as training in medicine or engineering, that made them hard to replace. "The hunger was hellish, and if you could work you could get something to eat," Stos said. Having grown up in the countryside, he could do a little bit of everything, from pouring concrete to cutting grass. I pressed him for details of his time in the camp, but he spoke only of the work. "I had eight different professions at Auschwitz," he said. "I knew how to take care of myself. I avoided the worst of it."

After about an hour, I thanked him and stood up to leave. He handed me a white envelope. Inside was a slim memoir he published nearly 30 years ago. "My memory isn't so good any more, you understand," he said, shaking my hand and smiling. "But it's all in there." Later, I flipped to a page near the end. In October 1944, Stos was sent from Auschwitz to a series of camps deep in Germany. On May 8, 1945-the day the war in Europe ended-he was liberated by Russian soldiers. On the book's second to last page is an undated black-and-white photo. It shows Stos with his children and grandchildren standing under the Arbeit Macht Frei sign.

Auschwitz didn't long remain a camp exclusively for Poles. In June 1941, Germany launched a surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, taking three million prisoners over the next seven months. Many were starved to death. Others were sent to occupied Poland or Germany as slave laborers. In the fall of 1941, ten thousand prisoners of war arrived at Auschwitz and began building the Birkenau camp.

Most of the POWs died within weeks. "When it was time to get up in the morning, those who were alive moved, and around them would be two or three dead people," one Russian survivor says in the 2005 book Auschwitz: A New History by Laurence Rees. "Death at night, death in the morning, death in the afternoon. There was death all the time." The prisoners built the barracks at Birkenau in a rush, laying a single course of bricks on poorly made foundations. The flood of Soviet POWs overwhelmed the already crowded camp. Pressure to "eliminate" people-the Nazi euphemism-grew.

Since the beginning of the war, special SS units called Einsatzgruppen had carried out mass executions of Jews and others in conquered territories; these commandos rounded up entire villages, forced them to dig their own graves and shot them. The massacres took a toll even on the German firing squads, says Debórah Dwork, a Holocaust historian at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and co-author (with van Pelt) of Holocaust: A History. "It's totally clear from Nazi documents," she says, "that Germans were looking for a way to murder masses of people without having such a traumatic impact on the murderers."

In 1940, the Nazis used carbon monoxide gas in secret euthanasia programs at mental hospitals in Germany to eliminate mentally ill or disabled people. From there, it was but a small step to Zyklon B, a cyanide compound designed for delousing. In September 1941, Auschwitz guards herded hundreds of Soviet POWs and sick inmates into the crudely sealed basement of Block 11, the dreaded punishment barrack; a guard threw in pellets of Zyklon B and shut the doors. They were the first people gassed at Auschwitz.

For the man in charge of Auschwitz, the gas chamber was a welcome innovation. "I had always shuddered at the prospect of carrying out executions by shooting," commandant Rudolf Höss wrote in a lengthy confession while awaiting execution after the war. "Many members of the Einsatzkommandos, unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed suicide. Some had even gone mad."

Guards and other camp personnel refined the procedures in ways that minimized their guilt and maximized efficiency. They soon moved the gassings from Block 11 to the crematorium at the camp's outer edge. The crematorium would survive the war mostly intact, and today is a central part of any visit to the camp.

"Responsibility is extremely direct in face-to-face shootings," Dwork says. "In gassing and cremation, each person is given only a small part." Eventually, Germans took part only by tossing the cyanide pellets into the gas chambers. Everything else-herding prisoners into the chambers, ripping out gold fillings and loading corpses into the crematoria-was handled by groups of prisoners, known as Sonderkommandos.

Adolf Hitler envisioned the eventual extermination of what he called "the Jewish plague," but the Führer didn't draw up the plans for the gas chambers or the timetables for the transports. And while it was senior SS officials who gave general instructions about how the camps should function, it was ordinary Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, who worked out the deadly details. "There wasn't a grand strategy in 1940 that the camp would accrue a number of functions and ultimately become a death camp," Dwork says. "I do not see it as planned at all. Way led to way, and step led to step."

By 1942, Auschwitz had mushroomed into a massive money-making complex that included the original camp, Birkenau (officially labeled Auschwitz II) and 40 sub-camps (mostly located in and around the nearby town of Oswiecim but some as far away as Czechoslovakia) set up to provide slave labor for chemical plants, coal mines, shoe factories and other ventures. In their eagerness to carry out orders, advance their careers and line their own pockets, mid-level bureaucrats like Höss implemented what came to be known as the Holocaust.

On January 20, 1942, fourteen such functionaries assembled at a lakeside villa outside Berlin to discuss a "Final Solution" to what was called "the Jewish problem." What we now know as the Wannsee Conference put on paper plans that Hitler and his subordinates had been talking about for months. Of Europe's 11 million Jews, those who could work would be worked to death, following the model already created at Auschwitz and other camps. Jews who were not selected for useful labor would be eliminated.

The conference led to a dramatic increase in activity at the Nazi death camps. In a massive campaign code-named Operation Reinhard, Germans killed 1.5 million Jews at small camps deep in the forests of eastern Poland from March 1942 to October 1943. Treblinka and the now nearly forgotten camps Sobibor and Belzec consisted of little more than gas chambers and train tracks. There were virtually no survivors, no witnesses.

Auschwitz is enshrined in history in part because, as a work camp, there were survivors. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was a 14-year-old Jewish cello student living in the German city of Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) when the war broke out. Two years later, she and her sister Renate were sent to work in a nearby paper factory. In 1942, after the Germans deported her parents to a death camp, the sisters doctored their identity papers and tried to escape.

They never made it beyond the Breslau train station. The Gestapo arrested them on the platform. The Lasker sisters were accused of forgery, aiding the enemy and attempted escape. After a perfunctory trial and months in a prison, they were sent to Auschwitz in separate transports as convicted felons in late 1943.

By then, Auschwitz was serving as both a slave labor facility and a death camp. As the Germans brought more and more Jews from all over Europe to the sprawling complex, SS doctors selected the fittest for work. Other prisoners were sent directly to Birkenau's gas chambers for what was euphemistically known as a special action. "Was present for first time at a special action at 3 a.m. By comparison Dante's Inferno seems almost a comedy," SS doctor Johann Paul Kremer wrote in his diary on September 2, 1942. Camp records show the transport he observed contained 957 Jews from France; only 12 men and 27 women were selected for work.

When I met her at her house in London, Lasker-Wallfisch, 84, explained that she and her sister avoided the dreaded selection process because they went to Birkenau as convicts. "People shipped from prisons weren't shipped in huge trainloads of Jews," Lasker-Wallfisch said. "They were shipped as individuals, which was an advantage. It's not worth turning the gas on for one Jew, I suppose." Instead, Lasker-Wallfisch was stripped, guards shaved her head and an inmate tattooed her with an identification number (a practice unique to Auschwitz).

Lighting a cigarette in her airy, light-filled London living room, she shows me the blurred, faded number high up on her left forearm: 69388.

At some point during her induction, Lasker-Wallfisch mentioned she played the cello. "That is fantastic," the inmate processing her said. "You will be saved." The Birkenau women's orchestra, responsible for keeping prisoners in step as they marched to work assignments, needed a cellist. "It was a complete coincidence," Lasker-Wallfisch said, shaking her head. "The whole thing was complete insanity from beginning to end."

After less than a year at Auschwitz, Lasker-Wallfisch and Renate were among the tens of thousands of prisoners transported to camps in Germany. Lasker-Wallfisch had no idea where she was being sent, but it didn't matter. "The gas chambers were still working when we left," she says. "I was very pleased to be rolling out of Auschwitz. We figured anything was better than the gas chamber." On April 15, 1945, British troops liberated Lasker-Wallfisch and Renate from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hamburg. Lasker-Wallfisch emigrated to England after the war and became a professional cellist. Her sister Renate worked for the BBC, and is now living in France.

As Soviet troops closed in on Auschwitz in late January 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated some 56,000 prisoners on death marches to the west, then blew up the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria to erase evidence of the mass murders. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Some 6,000 people were still alive at Birkenau. Another 1,000 were found at the main camp.

Fleeing Germans also torched a couple of dozen of the wooden barracks at Birkenau. Many of the camp buildings that were left largely intact were later taken apart by Poles desperate for shelter. Birkenau remains the starkest, most tangible, most haunting reminder of what Dwork says was the "greatest catastrophe Western civilization permitted, and endured."

Ever since the Auschwitz memorial and museum first opened to the public, in 1947, workers have repaired and rebuilt the place. The barbed wire that rings the camps must be continuously replaced as it rusts. In the 1950s, construction crews repairing the crumbling gas chamber at the main Auschwitz camp removed one of the original walls. Most recently, the staff has had to deal with crime and vandalism. This past December, the Arbeit Macht Frei sign was stolen by thieves, who intended to sell it to a collector. Although the sign was recovered, it was cut into three pieces and will need to be repaired.

Inevitably, Auschwitz will grow less authentic with the passage of time. "You're seeing basically a reconstruction on an original site," says van Pelt, the historian. "It's a place that constantly needs to be rebuilt in order to remain a ruin for us."

He is not the only one to argue against wholesale preservation of the camp. A 1958 proposal called for paving a 230-foot-wide, 3,200-foot-long asphalt road diagonally across the main Auschwitz camp and letting the rest of the ruins crumble, forcing visitors to "confront oblivion" and realize they could not fully comprehend the atrocities committed there. The concept was unanimously accepted by the memorial design committee-and roundly rejected by survivors, who felt the plan lacked any expression of remembrance.

For the preservation staff, the burden of remembrance informs every aspect of their restoration efforts. "If there's damage to an object as part of its history, we leave it that way," Banas says. She points to crates of shoes stacked in a hallway, most with worn insoles and uneven heels-signs of human use that will be left as they are. The International Auschwitz Council-museum officials and survivors from around the world dedicated to the conservation of Auschwitz-has decided that the mounds of hair will be allowed to decay naturally because they are human remains.

After three days at Auschwitz, I was left with the feeling that for some visitors, the former concentration camp is a box to check off on a tourist "to-do" list. But many people appeared genuinely moved. I saw Israeli teenagers crying and hugging each other and groups of people transfixed by the mug shots of prisoners that line the walls of one of the Auschwitz barracks. Walking through the room full of hair still makes my stomach churn. But what I hadn't remembered from my first visit was the room next door filled with battered cooking pots and pans, brought by people who believed until the last moment that there was a future wherever they were being taken. And when Banas told me about the carefully folded math test that conservationists found hidden in a child's shoe, I choked up. Even if only a fraction of the people who come here each year are profoundly affected, a fraction of a million is still a lot of people.

There is no more forceful advocate for the preservation of Auschwitz than Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. Born in Warsaw in 1922, Bartoszewski, 87, was a Red Cross stretcher-bearer when the German Army invaded the capital city in September 1939. Plucked off the street by German soldiers a year later, he was sent to Auschwitz. He'd been there seven months when the Red Cross arranged for his release in April 1941-one of the few inmates ever set free.

After Auschwitz, he helped found an underground organization to help Poland's Jews. He fought against the German Army during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. He was jailed three times: twice as an active dissident during Poland's early communist era and once for his support of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

Today, he is chairman of the International Auschwitz Council. Nothing, he says, can replace the actual site as a monument and memorial. "It's great that you can go to a Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.," he says. "But no one died in Washington in the Holocaust. Here-here is a massive cemetery without gravestones. Here they spent their last moments, here they took their last steps, here they said their last prayers, here they said goodbye to their children. Here. This is the symbol of the Holocaust."

Andrew Curry's article on Hadrian's Wall appeared in the October 2009 Smithsonian. Maciek Nabrdalik is an award-winning photographer who resides in Warsaw.

About Andrew Curry

Andrew Curry is a Berlin-based journalist who writes about science and history for a variety of publications, including National Geographic, Nature, and Wired. He is a contributing editor at Archaeology and has visited archaeological excavations on five continents. (Photo Credit: Jennifer Porto)

Read more from this author | Follow @spoke32

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Smithsonian Magazine | Everyone who visits Auschwitz remembers the hair: almost two tons of it, piled behind glass in mounds taller than a person. When I first visited the camp, in 1991, the hair was still black and brown, red and blond, gray and white-emotionally overwhelming evidence of the lives extinguished there.

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Anne Frank House, Westermarkt, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Anne Frank House, Westermarkt, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Anne Frank House, Westermarkt, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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The Publication of Anne Frank's Diary

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'What I read in her book is so indescribably captivating that I just have to keep reading.'

At first, Otto could not bear to read Anne's texts. 'I don't have the strength to read them,' he wrote to his mother on 22 August 1945. A month later, he had changed his mind and could not put them away. Otto decided to copy excerpts for his relatives in Basel and started working on a translation into German.

'At first, I was put off by the idea of publication, but I gradually realised that they were right.'

'A very different Anne'

Otto had always thought that he had a fair idea of what went on inside Anne's head. But when he read her texts, he realised that this had not been the case. 'The Anne that appeared before me was very different from the daughter I had lost. I had had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings.'

Otto's excerpts were read not just by his relatives, but by friends as well. They felt that Anne's texts were 'an important human document' and that Otto should not keep the texts to himself. It took some time before Otto agreed with them. Still, it was not easy to find a publisher so soon after the war, because most people wanted to look to the future.

'A Child's Voice'

His acquaintances Jan and Annie Romein, both historians, helped Otto Frank find a publisher. Jan Romein had read the diary and written a short column titled 'A Child's Voice' about it for Het Parool, a Dutch newspaper.

Among other things, he wrote: 'When I finished the book, it was night and I was amazed that the lights were still on, that there was bread and tea, that I did not hear the roaring of airplanes or the thumping of soldiers' boots in the street - I had been captivated and taken back to the unreal world that is now almost a year behind us.'

Otto's compilation

Jan Romein's column piqued the interest of Contact, an Amsterdam publishing house. Otto made a compilation of Anne's diary, her rewritten diary texts, and some short stories.

He decided, for instance, to include some of the critical texts that Anne had written about her mother and that she had left out from her rewritten version. Anne had also omitted her crush on Peter, but Otto decided to include those texts as well. He omitted other things, such as a piece in which Anne wrote harshly about Otto's marriage to Edith.

The complete works of Anne Frank

Anne's wish comes true

The book was published in 1947, just over five years after Anne's thirteenth birthday, the day she had received her diary. She had come up with the title of the book herself: Het Achterhuis ( The Secret Annex). Looking back, Otto Frank wrote: 'How proud Anne would have been if she had lived to see this. After all, on 29 March 1944, she wrote: "Imagine how interesting it would be if I published a novel about the Secret Annex."'

The Dutch edition received positive reviews, such as 'a war document of striking density' and 'Parents and educators are strongly advised to read this diary.' After the first edition (3,036 copies), the second edition (6,830) followed in December 1947 and the third edition (10,500 copies) in February 1948.

Learning from the past

The success of Het Achterhuis in the Netherlands encouraged Otto Frank to look for publishing opportunities in other countries. After a French edition (1950), followed a German one (also in 1950). In 1952, two English versions were published, one for Great Britain and the other for the US. According to Otto Frank, the book made a deep impression on readers everywhere.

It did not stop at these four translations. Over the years, many more were added. Anne Frank's diary is now available in over 70 languages. Until his death in 1980, Otto Frank continued to receive reactions from readers from all over the world, who had been moved by the book. With some of them, he developed close friendships. About these letters, he wrote that '(...) despite all the differences (...) there is usually a desire to learn from the past and to work towards a better understanding among people.'

Attachment: pseudonyms of the people in hiding and the helpers.

The real names of the people in hiding and the pseudonyms Otto selected for the people in Het Achterhuis.

Real names Otto's decision

Otto Frank

Otto Frank

Edith Frank

Mrs Frank / Mum

Margot Frank

Margot Frank

Anne Frank

Anne Frank

Hermann van Pels

Mr Van Daan

Auguste van Pels

Mrs / Petronella van Daan

Peter van Pels

Peter van Daan

Fritz Pfeffer

Albert Dussel

The real names of the helpers and the pseudonyms Otto selected for them in Het Achterhuis.

Real names Otto's decision

Miep Gies

Miep van Santen

Jan Gies

Henk van Santen

Johannes Kleiman

Mr Koophuis

Victor Kugler

Mr Kraler

Bep Voskuijl

Elli Vossen

Johan Voskuijl

Mr Vossen

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'What I read in her book is so indescribably captivating that I just have to keep reading.' At first, Otto could not bear to read Anne's texts. 'I don't have the strength to read them,' he wrote to his mother on 22 August 1945.

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The Choice to Publish Anne Frank's Diary: A Father's Dilemma

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Otto Frank talks Anne's diary | Anne Frank House