Try to imagine this. You are hired to preserve piles of shoes left behind by murdered children. Not just dozens of children, not hundreds, not even thousands. These shoes remain from more than a quarter-million boys and girls executed at the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The leather is actually fairly easy to maintain, provided it survived this long. The metal — nails holding soles on, for example, presents the biggest risk. It rusts, and rust hastens the decay of everything else.
You hold a shoe in the palm of your hand — they are literally that small in many cases — and you have to keep from thinking that a youngster once wore it while playing in the streets, walking hand-in-hand with a parent, or sitting in a park with warm sunlight basking his or her face, maybe petting a dog or watching a squirrel.
You work on it while ignoring the fact the innocent person knew nothing of war or Nazis until they came and collected people because of their faith, not their politics. You try not to consider the pain upon separation from parents and family. And you certainly don’t want to dwell on the reality that the youngest were often the first to be condemned to death upon reaching Auschwitz thanks to a very simple equation: They could never produce enough forced labor to make up for the resources needed to keep them alive.
They entered a camp where the slogan over the gate, Arbeit Macht Frei — “Work will make you free” — was more than propaganda, more than a lie. It was a hope completely denied. They were not allowed to live long enough to try to work.
People have spent two years (so far) preserving those shoes, in makeshift labs set up within the bowels of the Nazi’s most infamous concentration camp. PBS News Hour — and please don’t dismiss this because of the source; we cannot afford to ever dismiss this — aired a segment about it Sunday, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. You can watch it at pbs.org. It’s only seven minutes and 48 seconds.
Nazis executed some 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. About 1.5 million were children. Of those, 235,000 perished at Auschwitz. Auschwitz currently has about 120,000 shoes; the conservators are painstakingly working on 8,000 of that collection.
The correspondent reporting the story noted Auschwitz victims “have no graves. The only tangible evidence of their earthly presence are the possessions the Germans confiscated as they ordered the Jews to take a shower.”
Shoes, baskets, suitcases — even hair; Nazis often decided things were worth saving, but people were not.
Please, as you think of anything else going on, think of those children, think of those shoes. It is not just a slogan, it is a mandate of the heart and soul, a requirement of being human.
“Never forget.”
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