Madrid opens first global roving Auschwitz exhibit

Letters thrown from death trains, tiny children’s shoes, a Nazi gas mask and hundreds of other objects from Auschwitz are going on display in Madrid as a roving exhibition on the Nazi extermination camp opens.

Some will leave the memorial site of the German death camp in Poland for the first time for an exhibition that starts in the Spanish capital on December 1 before heading on a tour that will take in a dozen cities in Europe, America, Asia and Oceania.

Items include inmates’ drawings found in a bottle hidden in the camp, a piece of electrified fence and an original carriage like those used to take Jews, Poles, prisoners of war, gypsies and others to the camp where over 1.1 million people died during the Second World War.

More than 600 objects will be on display for those who can’t travel to see Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis’ biggest concentration and extermination camp where hundreds of thousands were killed in the gas chambers or died from starvation, disease and exhaustion before it was liberated 72 years ago.

Entitled “Auschwitz: Not far away, not long ago,” the exhibition will stay in Madrid until June before starting its global tour.
S
ome 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland in 1940 and which became Europe’s biggest death camp.

More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there before the camp was liberated by Soviet forces in 1945.

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