Photo: © AP Photo/Sven Kaestner
The door of the gas chamber from the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, the flaps of the crematorium ovens, gas masks of the executioners and cans of the poisonous Zyklon-B substance, with which they destroyed the prisoners - these are the exhibits of Auschwitz: Not Long Ago. Not Far Away exposition at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, TASS reports.
The exhibition will be open on May 8. “Our goal is to remind people of the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp,” Ronald Lauder, Chairman of the World Jewish Congress and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Committee said.
A separate section of the exhibition is devoted to the liberation of Auschwitz by the soldiers of the Red Army on January 27, 1945. It presents the field map of the southern part of Poland, which was used by officers of units from the First Ukrainian Front under the command of Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Konev, who liberated the camp during the Vis-Oder operation.
"Fifteen miles southeast of Katowice, in the industrial region of Silesia, Marshal Konev’s troops captured Auschwitz - the place where the most famous German death camp in Europe was located. 1.5 million people were killed in the Auschwitz torture chambers". This is the quote from The New York Times for January 28, 1945, which opens the exhibition.
"We tried to give the visitors an idea about what Red Army soldiers felt when they came to the barbed wire of the concentration camp," Senior Exhibition Curator Robert Jan van Pelt told. "We may differ on the role of Joseph Stalin, but any of the survivors in the concentration camp will surely say: "I will forever be grateful to the Red Army!"
Russkiy Mir
