My buddy and former colleague Andrew Curry wrote a great story for the February issue of Smithsonian about whether Auschwitz should be saved. Now it’s a museum with more than a million visitors last year. Some people say we’d be better off letting it crumble. Andrew talked to three survivors for the story, one of whom said this about why she wasn’t killed on arrival: “People shipped from prisons weren’t shipped in huge trainloads of Jews…. They were shipped as individuals, which was an advantage. It’s not worth turning the gas on for one Jew, I suppose.”
photo: me, 2008
To me, a place like Auschwitz needs to be saved. God knows there’s enough Holocaust deniers out there as it is. But more than just for a physical record, that place and others like it serve as a visceral reminder of what happens in society gone bad and that those that believe in life and self-determination must never let something like that occur again.