Horror Display At Auschwitz Visited

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29990, 27 November 1962, Page 2

Horror Display At Auschwitz Visited

A miniature display depicting the horrors of Auschwitz concentration camp, including a mat made of human hair, a room containing artificial limbs, another full of babies’ clothes, may be seen by tourists at the original camp situated near Krakow in Poland.

A recent Christchurch visitor, Mrs E. A. Elliott, of Memorial avenue, said that the gas chambers, firing wall and broken barbed wire enclosures are still there. At the entrance to the camp is a huge urn containing human ashes. Inside there is a sign reading, “Work is your freedom.” This is generally interpreted as meaning, “here you are ■worked to your death, and there is freedom in dearth,” Mrs Elliott said.

Mrs Elliott, who made a 12 months’ tour of Europe, the Holy Lands and the Near East, found her tour of the Iron Curtain countries “intensely interesting but very oppressive.” ‘ The atmosphere was "perplexing”—she attended a superb performance by a top Russian ballet, but noticed that members of the orchestra wore neither ties nor jackets. Domestic staff in a hotel had their hair done in the same hotel salon as the guests. The guide who conducted Mrs Elliott’s tour party in Moscow said he was amazed to find that Westerners could be so happy. But in Poland, there were many who thought wistfully of the free countries A man who serviced Mrs Elliott’s camera would not accept payment, but asked her instead, “When you get back to your free New Zealand, give a thought to Poland.”

To remind her of her tour. Mrs Elliott has brought home a collection of 24 dolls. There is a Muscovite dressed in typical peasant costume of red hood, dirndle skirt, blouse and pretty half apron and from Lebanon a doll wearing the everyday dress of the Bedouins, long and almost Victorian in Its simplicity. Two novelties from Germany are dancing dolls. About two inches high, with long feathers in their hats, they are worked by a magnet.

Another dancing doll, from Switzerland, is dressed in the traditional costume worn by the mountain folk when they come down to Sunday church.