Auschwitz exhibit underscores United Nations commitment to human rights.

Auschwitz exhibit underscores United Nations commitment to human rights

"Let the memory of the victims of genocide at Auschwitz lead to an unwavering determination to protect the rights of every human being everywhere", said Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar on 10 December 1985, Human Rights Day, in opening a photo exhibit entitled "Auschwitz: A Crime against Mankind".

The exposition, produced by the International Auschwitz Committee in association with the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland, will be on display at Headquarters before touring a number of United States cities under the sponsorship of the United Nations Centre for Human Rights.

Among the photographs are those depicting the physical plant of Auschwitz, including the crematoria; inmates en route to the gas chambers; and emaciated survivors at the time of liberation. Also on exhibit are personal effects--eyeglasses, shoes, suitcases, hairbrushes, spoons, rosaries--found after the camps were liberated.

"The commitment of the United Nations to promoting human rights derived its special impetus from the atrocities committed before and during the Second World War", the Secretary-General affirmed. "From [the victims'] death and their suffering, let a world order emerge which will be faithful to the precepts of the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights], a world which will never again allow crimes against humanity such as those committed at Auschwitz."

The camp has been designated a "World Heritage" site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

In a statement at the ceremony, Maurice Goldstein, President of the International Auschwitz Committee; traced the history of the Nazi death camps, which claimed the lives of an estimated four million people, mostly Jews, from 20 countries. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, which was opened on 14 June 1940, by 1942 had become the largest extermination camp of European Jews, he said. Inmates spared the gas chamber were often earmarked for medical experiments aimed at developing economical sterilization methods for both men and women.

From the summer of 1944, in the face of advancing Soviet troops, the Auschwitz-Birkenau compound was gradually evacuated. In January 1945, more than 60,000 inmates were marched to other camps further west. On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army freed about 5,000 inmates at Auschwitz, who were sick or unfit for evacuation and whom the German SS had not had time to execute.

Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor and Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, told those who attended the ceremony:

"In Auschwitz, men and women looked alike. They had no age, no name, no identity, no individually, no face; they did not laugh, nor did they cry; they did not laugh, nor did they curse. They lived in a creation parallel to ours--a creation dominated and willed by death. We lived inside death. The killers themselves were dead, for their humanity had died."

Mr. Wiesel continued: "Who were the citizens of that world, of that twisted and distorted demonic 'United Nations'? People from all over Europe--and beyond. Russian prisoners of war, French underground fighters, Dutch and Norwegian and Danish freedom fighters, Polish and Ukrainian and Lithuanina and Belgian men and women who defied Nazi occupation, priests and scholars, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses, communists and liberals."

"We remember Auschwitz", said Mr. Wiesel, "for the sake of all victims everywhere who suffer. We remember our hunger so as to eliminate starvation today. We remember our anguish so as to proclaim the right of men and women everywhere to live without fear.