SHOAH: the Permanent Exhibition in Block 27 at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

Auschwitz-Birkenau, where over one million Jewish men, women and children and approximately 125,000 non-Jews were murdered by the German Nazis, has entered human consciousness as the representation of supreme human evil as well as the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust of the Jewish people – the Shoah. This has found expression in the UN's decision to establish International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, the date the Red Army entered the camp. The extensive scope of research, literature, educational endeavors and actual visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau over the years testifies...

Open your eyes, visitor, and gather your inner strength; what you will see here may put your mental sanity and moral quest in peril.You will see here all that cannot be seen anywhere else: the infinite ability of tormentors and also their victims' endless agony.How could human beings first imagine then commit such inhuman actions against other human beings? Is it that here it was human to be inhuman?In this place of ultimate malediction, the human condition entered its ultimate metamorphosis, with the enemy inventing new ways of torment, torture and murder, unprecedented in recorded history.More...

Prof. Chanan de Lange is former Head of the Department of Industrial Design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and, together with architect Tal de Lange, heads the prominent Studio de Lange that has been involved in a large variety of industrial and private projects. Prof. de Lange was appointed by Yad Vashem to coordinate the layout of the new Jewish exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. In a special interview preceding the opening of the new exhibition, Prof. De Lange described the complex process of designing the space together with the Studio's team and...

Nazi ideology not only blamed the Jewish people for the world's troubles, but also targeted every single Jewish child for annihilation – the most extreme expression of genocide. When the New Permanent Exhibition in Auschwitz-Birkenau was being devised, Yad Vashem approached world-acclaimed artist Michal Rovner to create a work for the space devoted to the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered during the Shoah.

The World That WasDirectly adjoining the exhibition's entranceway, which displays the word Shoah and a definition of the term in English, Hebrew and Polish, is an opening bearing the words and melody of the prayer Ani Ma'amin ("I Believe"), a basic tenet of Jewish faith. Immediately following is a large room that contains a 360-degree cinematic montage of Jewish life before the Shoah. This vital component of the exhibition illustrates the remarkable diversity of Jewish life between the wars. Original footage of various Jewish communities across prewar Europe and North Africa,...

How did human beings become mass murderers during WWII and the Holocaust? Why did the Allies not bomb Auschwitz? Could a victim also be a perpetrator or bystander? Where was God during the Holocaust? What happened to the concepts of good and evil after the Shoah? These and other ethical, philosophical and theological questions regarding the Holocaust, inevitably raised in the minds and hearts of visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau, are presented in the Center for Reflection attached to the new permanent exhibition in Block 27.The Center for Reflection is based on the same successful model as the innovative...