Auschwitz, liberated 60 years ago today, changed the world, but its legacy means different things to different people. Daniel McLaughlin reports from Oswiecim in Poland
Before the Nazis arrived in southern Poland, people here called Oswiecim the "Jewish town". By the time the Germans fled, it had an indelible new name: Auschwitz.
When the Red Army reached this place 60 years ago today, they found 7,000 emaciated, disease-ridden survivors in a place where more than one million Jews and perhaps 500,000 Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and prisoners of war had been killed.
This obscure little town was at the epicentre of an unprecedented crime, and the waves of horror that it generated changed the world.
The United Nations was formed in response to the atrocities of the second World War, and it voted in 1947 to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, to prevent the possibility of another pogrom on the scale of that launched by the Third Reich.
The post-war Nuremberg Trials instituted the charge of "crimes against humanity" and levelled it against the men who planned and executed the Nazis' Final Solution, paving the way for today's international tribunals for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, where the UN failed dismally to prevent genocide.
The world has moved on, and only comes to Oswiecim to look back.
Abandoned warehouses and gaping windows line streets where textile and chemical works and two distilleries once thrived. The only business here is Auschwitz, a perpetual remembering that stifles the present and obscures the future.
"This town carries a very heavy historical burden and it is very difficult to invest here, which means it is hard to find work," says Monika (23), a saleswoman in a deserted shopping centre opposite the site of the concentration camp.
While recognising Oswiecim's moral and historical duty to remember events here, the Mayor, Janusz Marszalek, wishes that the camp's hundreds of thousands of annual visitors would "try to understand that there are two towns here: one alive, the other a memorial."
International Jewish groups have blocked plans for a nightclub close to the camp and for a shopping centre in a building where the Nazis hoarded the belongings of their victims. Even a group of Carmelite nuns were forced to scrap plans for a convent alongside the camp after being accused of defiling a sacred Jewish burial ground.
"They butt into the town's business too much," says labourer Slawek (28), of the lobby that wants Oswiecim to exist only as a memorial to the Holocaust.
"Every project leads to a protest. Sure, our town has a difficult past but we want to live normal lives," he says of Oswiecim's 42,000 people, almost one-fifth of whom are unemployed.
As the unwilling site of the Nazi death camps, Poland has its own sensitivities about the Holocaust, sharpened by allegations that scores of ordinary Poles helped the occupying Germans kill Jews.
Ms Marzena Konopka-Klus, an Auschwitz guide, says visitors are forbidden to make recordings of guided tours after some people edited them to try and "prove that Poles are anti-Semites, even those who work at the Auschwitz museum." After being invaded and abused by the Nazis and then the Soviets after the war, many Poles feel their loss has never been properly recognised.
This country lost a fifth of its entire population - six million civilians, half of them non-Jews - to German death squads and concentration camps.
"In America and France, people thought I was Jewish because I was in Auschwitz," says Polish artist and theatre director Jozef Szayna (82), who was sent to the camp in July 1941.
"Everyone thinks there were no [ Catholic] Poles in concentration camps. Mein Kampf says what fate awaited Slavs and Poles but no one ever says what happened to us in the war. We were subjected to many forms of torture."
But nowhere remembers like Israel, a country built on the memory of the Shoah, as Jews call the Holocaust.
"Auschwitz is a part of our daily life, not our past," says Shevah Weiss, Israel's former speaker of parliament and a Holocaust survivor.
"In our society, our souls, our national spirit, everything is connected with the memory of the dark period of Auschwitz." The feeling of being abandoned to their fate by the wartime Allies still lingers among Jews, and fuelled their desire for their own state, and then to arm it to the teeth.
"The state of Israel has learned the lesson of Auschwitz. It has learned to defend itself, to defend its people against its enemies and to serve as a place of shelter for Jews," the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, said yesterday. "The lesson is that we cannot rely on anyone but ourselves."
Yossef Lapid, a former Israeli justice minister, claims prejudice is surging back: "No one could have imagined in 1945, just after the Shoah, that the issue would resurface and there would be a revival of anti-Semitism disguised as criticism of Israel." Jewish groups say that some French and British reporting on the Palestinian conflict is coloured by anti-Semitism, giving fuel to a smouldering far-right fire.
France's nationalist leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, stoked it this month when he said Nazi occupation "was not particularly inhuman, even if there were a few blunders." In Britain, attacks on Jews and Jewish graves are rising, and campaigners were stunned by Prince Harry's decision to wear a Nazi fancy dress outfit this month, even though a recent poll showed that 45 per cent of Britons had never heard of Auschwitz.
In Germany last week, members of a small far-right party caused uproar by walking out of a regional parliament's commemoration of Holocaust victims.
Russia's anti-Semitic reputation was reinforced recently by a letter from 20 members of parliament, which called for a ban on Jewish groups for being an "anti-Christian" threat to Russia, and alleged that "the whole democratic world today is under the financial and political control of the Jews".
When the UN held its first-ever session dedicated to the Holocaust on Monday, it was noted that the Soviet Union had been the main cause of the delay, with its assertion that Nazi aggression had been aimed at all Soviet citizens rather than focusing on Jews.
Eastern Europe still grapples with anti-Semitism, and nationalist parties or their recent offspring wield sometimes-alarming influence across the region.
Denounced by the Nazis as the lifeblood of communism, then hounded by the Soviets as inveterate capitalists, Eastern Europe's Jews had little respite last century, and millions left for Israel. Reconciliation is hampered by a widespread reluctance to explore how home-grown fascist regimes or militias helped the Nazis do their dirty work.
Israel aside, no nation has tried harder than Germany to stare the Holocaust in the face.
The Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, said this week that the Nazi genocide was for Germans "part of our national identity", just as it is for Israelis.
"Remembering the era of National Socialism and its crimes is a moral obligation - we owe that not only to the victims, the survivors and the relatives, but to ourselves. It is true that the temptation to forget and suppress it is great, but we will not succumb to it," Mr Schröder said, vowing that a national Holocaust memorial, to be opened next to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in May, would be a "signal against forgetting." Germany's push for a clear-eyed reckoning with Nazi rule contrasts with not only Eastern Europe's reluctance to look back, but with the ambivalence of its neighbour, Austria, which spawned several senior Nazis and thousands of eager collaborators.
The refusal to acknowledge can become a willingness to deny, according to US academic Deborah Lipstadt, who has clashed with right-wing historians like David Irving over their denial of the scale, and sometimes the very fact, of the Holocaust."The denier's window of opportunity will be enhanced in years to come.
"The public, particularly the uneducated public, will be increasingly susceptible to Holocaust denial as survivors die out," Ms Lipstadt writes. "The bacillus of prejudice is exceedingly tenacious and truth and memory exceedingly fragile."
Dozens of world leaders, including the President, Mrs McAleese, will be here tomorrow to help carry a burden of memory that is crushing the small town of Oswiecim.
Primo Levi, who walked out of Auschwitz 60 years ago today, held its weight for 42 years and then killed himself. He knew the temptation, and the danger, of forgetting.
"Many new tyrants have kept in their drawer Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf," the Italian wrote in We Must Be Listened To, one of his final essays.
"With a few changes perhaps, and the substitution of a few names, it can still come in handy."
Series concluded.
Tomorrow: Daniel McLaughlin will report from Poland on the memorial ceremony attended by the President