Auschwitz museum begins emotional work of conserving 8,000 shoes of murdered children

By VANESSA GERA
Associated Press

OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — The Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum has launched a two-year effort to preserve 8,000 shoes that belonged to children before they were murdered at the Nazi German death camp. In all, about 110,000 shoes of victims remain at Auschwitz, some on display in a large room where visitors file by daily. Many are warped and are in a state of decay, yet they endure as emotional testaments of lives brutally cut short. Most of the victims were Jews killed in dictator Adolf Hitler’s effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Museum workers describe the children’s shoes as one of the most emotional testaments of the crimes carried out at Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million people were murdered during World War II.