Source: SFGate
“Silence pervades the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau today. Sometimes the only sounds are the soft footsteps of visitors, people who come from all over the world to mourn and to learn, and the voices of their guides speaking in hushed tones into microphones trying to explain the ungraspable. It can feel that time has stood still at the place where Nazi German forces killed 1.1 million people, most of them Jews. Some objects look just as they did when the camp was liberated by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945, an anniversary being marked at the site on Monday. There are the barracks which housed prisoners, a wall where the Nazi German forces shot prisoners to death, the gas chambers and crematoria where they were gassed to death and cremated. Encircling the vast site are barbed wire fences, which even today look as they did in wartime images.” (01/25/25)