Auschwitz suitcases get high-tech storage

EU-subsidized repository to preserve belongings of thousands interred at Nazi death camp

By AP 19 December 2014, 8:40 pm

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A screen grab of a pile of suitcases belonging to people interred in Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp. The suitcases are featured in an exhibit at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum in Poland.

WARSAW, Poland — The Auschwitz museum says some of the victims’ 3,800 suitcases have been put into a state-of-the-art protective storage room partly funded by the European Union.

Spokesman Pawel Sawicki told The Associated Press on Friday that 1,800 suitcases have been placed into air-conditioned, fireproof storage cupboards tailored to fit the various sizes of luggage. Another 2,000 suitcases are on display but will be rotated into the storage room.

Many of the suitcases are signed by their owners. One is from Else Sara Ury, a German-language Jewish author of children’s books popular in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. She died in an Auschwitz gas chamber in 1943. More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, died at the concentration camp from 1940-45.

The Auschwitz museum can now be visited online.