[With its manicured garden and spacious interior, the three-story villa at 88 Legionow Street in Oświęcim, Poland was once described as “paradise” by the mother who raised her five children there. And much was done to preserve the household’s tranquility, given its immediate neighbor: the largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz.
Inside the family home, Rudolf Höss – the longest serving SS commandant of Auschwitz – dreamt up the most efficient way to kill the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political prisoners that the Third Reich had decided to eliminate.
Their was a joyful life. The children played with turtles, cats, rode horses and swam in the nearby river. Meanwhile, the concentration camp’s chimneys spewed smoke as other families were pushed into the gas chambers.
Since Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, the house had been in the private hands of a Polish family. But last year, it was acquired by the Counter Extremism Project, a New York-based NGO that has sought to combat extremism since 2014. Within days, the building, a potent symbol of how the Holocaust was orchestrated, will open its doors to visitors in a brand-new form.
The NGO’s plans for the house are twofold: to give a new center to their organization and to open this long-closed-off house to the public in time for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp on January 27. The project’s director, Hans Jakob Schindler, hopes that the museum will serve as a global center to fight extremism and anti-semitism.
Rudolf Höss’s diary, written after his capture and before his execution, has been found. In it, he described himself as a man committed to discipline and dedicated to order. He wrote that it was “to protect the mental health” of his guards that he decided to utilize Zyklon B, an insecticide he used to murder as many Jews as effectively as possible.
Höss also recounted how he watched women and children being taken to the gas chambers, but at no point did he appear to understand the horror of his actions. He called the extermination of the Jews a “mistake” rather than a crime, something that was the result of obeying too blindly orders from above, given, he says, on the basis of a mistaken ideology.
Höss went on the run after the liberation of Auschwitz, but was then captured and executed in 1947. His wife and daughter moved to the United States and have sought to distance themselves from what Rudolf Höss had done. The Counter Extremism Project plans to turn part of the property into a museum and the rest into a workspace.
As the plan is to open the house to the public, work to turn part of the property into a museum and the rest into a workspace will take many months, the Counter Extremism Project says. A mezuzah was attached to the front door as a way of both reclaiming the house and opening it to all.
Source link
