Terrible Modelling

This is not about terrible modelling quality, but of modelling a terrible prototype: Human beings being gassed to death in a death camp. The model is not just any model, but a model exhibited in the Auschwitz I concentration camp near Krakow in Poland. The model is built to illustrate the process of assembly, undressing, killing and cremating over 1 mio (in Auschwitz alone!) Jews and people that the Nazi regime didn't like. A broad group of e.g. homosexuals, communists, trade unionists, Soviet POWs, Romas and mentally ill, but primarily Jews. 

In white the whole industrial killing facility is understated and the figures are anonymous. Yet it is easy to imagine yourself and your family waiting at the entrance of the undressing room. A pile of Zyklon B pellets is located in front of the diorama.  

How anyone has picked up strength to build a detailed model of the underground undressing room and gas chamber filled with struggling and dying humans is beyond my grasp. The cut-away building showing the crematorium is almost peacefully horrific compared to the other two heartbreakingly gruesome scenes. 

The diorama is L-shaped measuring approximately 8 by 5 meters. Scale is 1/15 and the diorama contains more than 300 full figures and even more modelled in relief and half hidden in the depths of the constructions. The figures may be partly built from commercial parts, but most are individually made and posed (as far as I could see through watery eyes).

I have mentioned historic models and dioramas before and the Auschwitz diorama is probably the most terrible model I have ever seen. No builder is mentioned on the display, but the modeller is Mieczyslaw Stobierski, who made the large diorama in 1948 for the Auschwitz Museum. Much later three copies of the diorama were made for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, and the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. On this website a detailed description of the diorama can be found. 

At the 'Neue Judenrampe' at Birkenau a single G10 goods wagon stands as a symbol of the thousands of railway wagon that brought people from all directions in the German occupied territories to KZ and death camps.

Apart from the museum at Auschwitz I, I also visited the huge Auschwitz II (Birkenau) extermination camp. Despite have read a lot about the location, I hadn't imagined the size to be so overwhelmingly large. I think that only a visit can truely give an impression of the utter evil committed here.

If you have the chance, visit the Auschwitz Museum. It's a terrible experience, but sometimes that is just what is needed to beef up one's humanity - so easily being chipped away by fake news and confrontational social media.