The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has opened a new permanent exhibition that sheds light on the everyday lives of prisoners held in the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp.
Among the most moving objects on display are small animal-shaped stencils fashioned from a concentration camp shoe by a mother and secretly given to her son as a Christmas gift. Other items include a paper cement bag reused as makeshift thermal underwear and drawings produced clandestinely by prisoners. These deeply personal artifacts are now exhibited in Blocks 8 and 9 of the former Auschwitz I camp.
According to exhibition coordinator Magdalena Urbaniak, the stencils in particular reveal the unimaginable emotional burden carried by prisoners. The act of creating something for a child under such conditions speaks to both desperation and humanity — an effort to lift a child’s spirits and help him endure the camp’s brutal reality.
The exhibition follows the daily routine imposed on prisoners: the morning gong, washing under extreme conditions, meagre meals, forced labor, and the return to overcrowded barracks at night. Through objects and personal testimony, visitors are confronted with the physical suffering and psychological terror experienced by inmates — hunger, cold, fear, and the constant presence of death.
As Auschwitz Museum deputy director Andrzej Kacorzyk has noted, the passing of eyewitnesses and the emergence of new generations demand a renewed way of telling this history. Rather than focusing solely on statistics, the exhibition emphasizes individual human experiences and personal fate, restoring identity to those who were systematically stripped of it.
Nazi Germany constructed more than 40 concentration, labor, and extermination camps at Auschwitz in occupied Poland during the Second World War. Auschwitz I was established in 1940 primarily to imprison Poles, while Auschwitz II–Birkenau, opened in 1942, became the principal site for the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
An estimated 1.1 million people were murdered at the Auschwitz complex. While Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust, Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, and others were also targeted by Nazi racial and political persecution.
The museum at Auschwitz was founded in 1947 and is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its long-standing permanent exhibition is now being systematically updated to reflect new historical research and the changing profile of visitors from around the world.
The current exhibition in Blocks 8 and 9 marks the completion of the first phase of this modernization project. A second phase, focusing specifically on the Holocaust and located in Blocks 6 and 7, is scheduled for completion in 2027. The final phase, which will examine Auschwitz as an institutional system of terror in Blocks 4 and 5, is planned for completion by 2030.
