Int'l council approves 'face-lift' plan for Auschwitz-Birkenau

The International Auschwitz Council has approved a plan to refurbish the exhibits at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland.

The initiative was announced last month by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum's new director, Dr. Piotr Cywinski, who claimed that the current exhibits were outdated and insufficiently attractive to visitors.

A speaker for the memorial told Haaretz that the current exhibit must be replaced as it does not address the identities of the victims and the perpetrators.

The International Auschwitz Council is the forum responsible for managing the site on behalf of the Polish prime minister, and its members include holocaust survivors and representatives of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.

Noah Flug, chairman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, said at the council?s meeting that Israeli holocaust survivors are weary of changes that might prejudice the site?s authenticity.

"We are in favor of preserving and keeping things the way they were as far as is possible and not of building anything anew," Flug said after Cywinski first announces plans to refurbish the site. "We are opposed to the beautification of the site. There are camps such as Bergen-Belsen that look pretty today, and they didn't look like that [during the Holocaust]."

Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, offered his assistance in refurbishing the exhibit.

Cywinski said he planned to replace the current exhibit, set up during the communist era, with a more attractive one that would embody relevant educational messages against anti-Semitism, racism and genocide.

During a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in October, Cywinski suggested including in the new exhibit personal stories of survivors and a section on anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust.

Over the past few months, work has been under way at Auschwitz-Birkenau to preserve the remains of five of the death camp's seven gas chambers and two of its crematoria buildings that were blown up by the Germans shortly before they abandoned the site in January 1945. Urgent preservation work is also required with respect to the personal items of the victims that are on display.

The recent concerns vis-a-vis changes at Auschwitz-Birkenau comes on the heels of criticism that has been voiced for some time now by Israeli historians who argue that the Jewish narrative that concerns the site is being pushed to the margins.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, where some 1.5 million people were murdered, is considered today one of the most popular tourist attractions in Poland: By the end of this year, the site will have been visited by around one million people from some 106 countries, including Pope Benedict XVI.

The museum and educational center at the site attract groups of teachers and historians with their seminars on genocide-related issues, and in recent years, various European countries have set up memorials to their citizens in buildings at the camp.

According to Yad Vashem's Prof. Israel Gutman, however, the international success of the site blurs the fact that more than 90 percent of the camp's victims were murdered for being Jews.

"The message arising from the exhibits is that various peoples were murdered at Auschwitz, and the fact that almost all those who were murdered were first and foremost Jews is being pushed aside," Gutman told Haaretz last month.