The curators of the Auschwitz Museum have a problem: How painfully precise should they be in a major restoration of the Holocaust's most infamous slaughterhouse?
Their mission is to preserve the horrific memory of the death camp, and of the Holocaust in general, while doing honor to the masses who died here. Advice on how to do it has conflicted sharply.Suggestions range from letting the site slowly rot and burning some of its contents, such as 2 tons of human hair, to reconstructing its gas chambers down to the last detail and offering video re-enactments.
The choices parallel those faced by film director Steven Spielberg, who selected a documentary style, with mostly black and white footage, in his just-released movie on the Holocaust, "Schindler's List."
But the 200 employees of the Auschwitz Museum have little of Spielberg's artistic independence. Their three-year, multimillion-dollar project is being funded by Germany, the United States and other countries. Dozens of historians, camp survivors and Jewish leaders are involved in the debate.
Some argue that the camp and its contents should be left to a "graceful aging," in the words of Professor James Young of the University of Massachusetts. He contends that there is no honest method of recreating the Holocaust experience.
At the other extreme is Jean-Claude Pressac, a French chemist who has documented the technical workings of Auschwitz and wants to rebuild a gas chamber so visitors can feel what it was like to be herded into one.
In 1945, as now, a single railroad track passed through the brooding gates of Birkenau, the part of the camp where mass extermination took place. It ends 300 yards later on a stone platform - the end of the line for some 1 million people.
The railroad ties are freshly tarred, and new gravel covers the siding where Nazi doctors separated the able-bodied from the young, old and weak, who were sent directly to the gas chambers.
But harsh winters and swampy land are causing many buildings to collapse.
The main Auschwitz camp, first set up in 1940, stands on 50 acres and has about 50 mostly brick buildings, which have been converted into museum space.
Birkenau, which the Nazis built a year later as a mass extermination camp, consists of 430 acres of barbed wire, guard posts and derelict barracks.
More than 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz and Birkenau, 90 percent of them Jews. In 1943 and 1944, when its four gas chambers could annihilate up to 24,000 people a day, Jews from across Europe arrived in closed boxcars.
Earlier this week, a group of visiting 11th graders from Hod Hasharon, Israel, marched along the track waving Israeli flags.
They walked to the memorial at the end of the rail line, and a few climbed into the ruins of an underground gas chamber, feeling their way along the brick walls.
"We think they should re-create everything exactly as it was," said Talli Cohen, the class's 40-year-old teacher. "Knowledge that it happened isn't enough. It has to be shown to future generations, so that nobody forgets."