With reverence, sometimes with tears in their eyes, the workers in the conservation lab pass the small shoes to each other. A couple and another couple, and another. One of them removes with a scalpel the sand stuck between the lace-up holes, his colleagues remove dust and dirt from the skin with cloths. The shoes are scanned, photographed, and recorded in the catalogue. About 8,000 shoes that belonged to children murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Mission Hoz is part of the project to preserve children's shoes that began a few weeks ago in the Nazi extermination camp on Polish soil. 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered here before the Nazis fled the site from the approaching Red Army. Eight decades later, some of the items that constitute contingent evidence of crimes are in the process of crumbling. Some of them – like hair – cannot be saved, and are doomed to crumble to dust.
Visitors gaze at a mountain of shoes at the Auschwitz Museum, a month ago, Photo: GettyImages
Not so the shoes. About 100,80 shoes belonging to the victims remain in the grounds of the Auschwitz Museum, about <>,<> of which are stacked on display. The shoes are worn, their color has faded, the laces are crumbling. Big shoes, small shoes.
"Sometimes the shoe is the only thing left as evidence," Photo: AP
"Children's shoes are the most movable objects for me because there is no greater tragedy than the children's tragedy," Miroslav Masiaszczyk, a conservation expert at the Auschwitz Museum's conservation laboratories, told The Associated Press. "Shoes are objects that are intimately associated with a person, a child. These are traces, sometimes the only traces left from the boy or girl."
An employee cleans a child's shoe. Sometimes they need breaks, Photo: AP
He said he and other conservation project workers have repeatedly experienced the tragedy behind the shoes. Sometimes, they need breaks to deal with the emotions that overwhelm them. Volunteers, who had worked with adult shoes in the past, asked to transfer them to other tasks.
The museum manages to handle about 100 shoes a week. Since the children's shoes project began, about 400 units have been treated. The goal is to preserve only, not to try to return the shoes to their original state. Most shoes come without a pair; Employees say it's very rare to find a pair attached by laces.
Gentle cleaning process. "The goal is to slow down the breakdown," Photo: AP
Sometimes, there are real discoveries. In the heeled shoe, which was treated last year, was found hidden a bill of 100 Italian liras. Recently found in the shoe of a girl named Vera Vohrizkova. By coincidence, a museum employee recalled seeing the name on one of the suitcases, and Vera's belongings were consolidated. She was 4 years old when she arrived in 1943 on a transport from Theresienstadt with her mother and brother. Her father was sent on another transport. The whole family perished.
Hungarian Jews arrive in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944,
Before the showers, the SS told their victims to be disinfected. "You can actually imagine people coming here, taking off their shoes and putting them on, assuming they could put them on when they got out of the shower," says Aljavetta Kaiser, who manages the museum's collection. "They didn't come back."
A visitor to the museum looks at the children's shoes, photo: AP
The shoe preservation project is funded by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, of which Germany is the main donor, as well as the March of the Living. Its cost is about 450,<> euros. "You can't keep your shoes forever," Kaiser and Masiashchik clarify. "Our goal is to slow down the process of disintegration, but it's hard to know how successful we will be."
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