Traveling to Poland for Auschwitz: The Past is Present will be a homecoming of sorts for Sabina Kobinski, who will return to her family’s homeland and the place where her own uncle was imprisoned during the Holocaust.

Branko Lustig, producer of Schindler’s List and our 50,000th interviewee in the Visual History Archive; recalls returning to Auschwitz during the filming of the TV mini-series War and Remembrance. Branko also describes how important it is not only to remember the Holocaust but also for future generations to learn from it.

Downloadable testimony clips of survivors attending the commemoration. The downloadable version of each clip is a Quicktime movie at 720x486 with a video bitrate of over 500 MBps.

Celina Biniaz describes how she and her parents were added to be on Schindler’ List. She also recalls when the women transport from Plaszow was sent to Auschwitz instead of to the Schindler factory in Brünnlitz.

Dario Gabbai recalls his experiences as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. He was forced to usher people into gas chambers, and then haul out the bodies, take them to the crematorium, and clean up the room for the next group of victims.

Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam were experimented on by infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. She describes how one experiment had nearly killed her but she promised herself she would survive.

Roman Kent describes the moment the cattle car door’s opened and the utter chaos of arriving to Auschwitz.

Auschwitz should never have existed, so why are we so keen to cling onto it? Would it not be reasonable to scrub it from the landscape, remove the very thought of what it represents from our minds, recognize it as the cemetery it is, then grass it over and leave the dead to rest in peace?