associate Auschwitz with Polish suffering and not the Jewish catastrophe. How is it possible, one can ask, that in a country where the Holocaust was perpetrated, where everybody was aware of the genocide occurring literally in front of them, half of the population believes in pernicious fallacies spun by the authorities? Actually, the phenomenon is not hard to explain, and the memorial techniques are as unsophisticated as they are successful.

First, a handful of undisputed facts: Auschwitz claimed the lives of 1–1.3 million Jews, 70,000–75,000 Poles, 20,000 Roma and 15,000–20,000 people of other nationalities. The Auschwitz complex was an enormous conglomerate of camps, sub-­camps and factories all using slave labour, all administered from the original camp, called KL Auschwitz I. This is the site best known today for the rows of red-­brick barracks and the iconic sign over the gate which reads “Arbeit macht f rei ” (Work makes you free). This was the place where thousands of Poles, the French, Russians and inmates of many other nationalities worked and died in horrible conditions. Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager ) , including Auschwitz I, were created primarily as places of exploitation, terror and hard labour, where an inmate’s death was a by-­product of the system, but not its primary objective. Extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) had no other purpose than killing. Death was not a by-­product – it was the product itself. The death camp Auschwitz II, or Auschwitz-­Birkenau,

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