Auschwitz Remains Powerful Symbol

It is among the most widely-recognized symbols of evil: An estimated 85 percent of the 1.3 million people who passed through the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp lost their lives as part of the Nazi's master plan for genocide and world domination. The camp was liberated by Soviet troops 65 years ago today.

The scene that greeted the Soviet soldiers was ghastly. A few thousand emaciated prisoners were struggling to hold on to their lives; 60,000 others had been evacuated by the Nazis and forced on west-bound death marches in the dead of winter. A former Red Army soldier present at liberation recalled the horrible condition of the prisoners, but remembered, "In their eyes, only in their eyes, there was joy. The joy of being free. The joy that their hell had finally ended."

The Soviets did not understand, at first, exactly what they had found, assuming that Auschwitz was an ordinary prison camp -- the realization of the camps true purpose was, in the understatement of the century, shocking.

Today, the structures of the camp -- the gates, the train tracks, the barracks, the killing centers -- stand quietly as monument to the ghosts of those who perished within them and a stark reminder of the human face of evil. In 1947, the Polish government decided to preserve the camp as a museum: “We want to preserve the memory of what the Nazis wanted to destroy,” said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor and former Polish foreign minister. Auschwitz received a record number of visitors in 2009, the vast majority of them young people -- hopefully an indication that while we may have failed at "Never Again," we still understand the importance of "Never Forget."

Photo credit: Adam Jones.