B – the sculpture :: International Auschwitz Committee :: Remember the past, be responsible for the future ::

News that travelled the world at the end of 2009: the theft of the inscription mounted above the entrance gate to Auschwitz Main Camp “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Sets You Free). It is now suspected that the theft was carried out on behalf of a right-wing extremist collector of Nazi memorabilia in Sweden who ‘placed the order’ for ‘the goods’ from Poland via contacts in the Swedish Nazi scene.

The inscription was a cynical lie, as all the prisoners knew and physically experienced day in, day out. But what most of them didn’t realize was that the sign contained a subversive message: the survivor Tadeusz Szymanski told of a conversation he had some years after the liberation with another survivor who had been forced to work in locksmith’s workshop at the camp. As he stood with Mr Szymanski beneath the gate, he told him that when the SS ordered him and his camp comrades to weld the sign together, they had deliberately placed the ‘B’ in the word ‘Arbeit’ upside down. It was a demonstration of self-esteem and self-assertion in an environment where all vestiges of human rights had been eradicated.

In order to remember the significance of the place Auschwitz, to remember the victims and the causes, but also to honour the ability to remember, a gift that only humans possess, the International Auschwitz Committee founded the “Gift of Remembrance” in 2010, 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. It is shaped in the form of the inverted ‘B’ in the word “Arbeit” above the entrance gate to Auschwitz concentration camp: to B remembered.

The idea for the artistic design of the sculpture came from Michèle Déodat of France who has been involved with the work of the International Auschwitz Committee for many years. A first draft for the sculpture was created by the Berlin artist Lutz Brandt. Trainees from Volkswagen AG in Hanover manufacture the sculptures. For twenty years now, groups of trainees from Volkswagen Coaching and Polish school students have been working together to preserve the Auschwitz Memorial, and where they have also been talking together with survivors of the concentration camp.