Holocaust Memorial Day: Auschwitz, a Photo Series.

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Introduction

A series of images designed to help the teacher invoke questions and emotional responses from their students. Allow the students to take note of what they see in the images, how they make them feel, how people in the era would have felt or simply open a class discussion.

Instructions

Play the images one after the other and pick the activity you would like them to do; write poetry, discuss what the images represent or even help inform some creative process being used to explore the impact of the holocaust.

Auschwitz

A photo series without words

The following resource assumes your students have some understanding of the events and locations of the holocaust.

They are all primary sources, showing various images of the Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland.

Talk through the images, what they show and how they make you feel. There are occasional notes on the slides to help you discuss the images or give them some context.

Note: For some places in Auschwitz, it is forbidden to take photos. These photos were taken with permission.

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Auschwitz 1

The famous 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign above Auschwitz 1 translates to 'Work will set you free' - a grim promise to ensure cooperation for the people within. Little did they know that it was all a lie.

These are used canisters of 'zyklon B' - the poison used to exterminate the inhabitants of Auschwitz 1 in the now notorious 'showers'.

Prosthesis of people that were executed at the camp. People who had a disability, either mental or physical, almost always found themselves going to the chambers before their more 'work-able' counterparts. 

Just some of the shoes of the victims of the camp. Note how the small red shoe of a small child is prominent. The Nazi party didn't care how old or how innocent their victims were.

Luggage from the inmates of Auschwitz 1 - labelled so that they could easily be returned if lost in transit, or reclaimed when it was time to go home. Sadly this time would never come.

Auschwitz 2

These train tracks took hundreds of thousands of innocent people directly into Auschwitz 2, never to take them back out again.

A view of the housing at Auschwitz 2 - although they look rather large from a distance, you would have hundreds of people crammed in, sleeping in long lines with no access to basic hygiene or decent food and drink.