On #InternationalHolocaustRemembranceDay I’m thinking about the politics of memory and what gets forgotten. The grounds of Sobibor, one of the largest death camps in Europe, are now owned by the Polish forestry service. The camp post office is now a single-family home.

There were dozens of concentration camps and 6 death camps. Some of them became museums. Most of them didn’t.

The gatehouse of Niederhagen in Germany, where ~1500 people died, is now a duplex.

Over 21,000 people died at Flossenbürg. There is a small museum there that opened in 2007.
The quarry at Flossenbürg, where thousands of people were worked to death, is leased to a private company.

Kaiserwald, a concentration camp in Latvia, was destroyed after liberation. The site is now occupied by apartment buildings and a playground.

Kauen, the concentration camp where thousands of Lithuanian Jews died, had a memorial erected to it in the 1980s. In the 1960s, the local Jewish cemetery was bulldozed, and the surviving Jewish community had to re-bury their dead in a general community cemetery.

Mauthausen in Poland, where between 127,000 and 300,000 people were killed, was colloquially called “the bone-grinder”. Today, numerous private homes sit on the site. It was one of the first concentrations camp built and amongst the last liberated. There is no museum.

Neuengamme, in Hamburg, Germany, was the site of the deaths of over 42,000 people. After liberation, it was converted into a prison. Until 2004, state prisons operated on the site. A memorial was erected in 2007.

At least 35,000 people died at Gusen, a sub camp of Malthausen. None of the buildings were maintained, although a small museum was founded in 2004.
A village now sits on top of the former site.

I genuinely don’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to walk you though all of the sub camps, many of which were destroyed and for which there is no memorial. When you include sub camps, there were hundreds of them. For as much as we say #WeRemember , we love to forget.