Auschwitz: Saving the soles of lives lost

Arie Pinsker has told his story dozens of times in his 92 years. But tears still well in his eyes when he looks at the huge pile of shoes left behind by those whose last steps were into the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Nazi-occupied southern Poland.

Pinsker's own parents were among the more than one million people murdered there. Of those, some 230,000 were children, including his six younger siblings. His family, which also included two older brothers, arrived at the camp from their village in Transylvania, after traveling crammed into crude train carriages with no food or water for five days. Gesturing tearfully to the shoes piled up behind glass, Pinsker wonders aloud, "perhaps here are their shoes; perhaps here are the shoes of my mother, of my sisters."

Separation saved his life

He was saved from the same fate after losing track of his parents when Nazi guards separated new arrivals and told some to prepare for "showers." He ran after his older brothers, whom he caught sight of headed in a different direction.

Pinsker's voice cracks when he recalls that afternoon. He tells DW he asked another youth who'd been there longer where he could expect to rejoin his family when they came out of the "showers."

"You don't know?" the other boy asked him. He pointed at the smoke pouring from nearby chimneys. "That's where they come out."

Pinsker never saw his parents or younger family members again. He was 13 years old. He would survive being one of the children who suffered cruel Nazi "experiments" at Auschwitz, then being sent to a work camp in Dachau in Bavaria, and even — though just barely — a death march from there, wearing wooden shoes with, he emphasizes, socks strictly forbidden.

Stories laced with sorrow

So now, as he holds a child's shoe tenderly, wearing plastic gloves so as not to contribute to its degradation, Pinsker emphasizes how important it is to preserve these last links to Holocaust victims. "This is all that remains of these children," he says sadly.

Flanking Pinsker at the launch event were fellow survivor Bogdan Barnikowski, along with representatives from the International March of the Living, an educational foundation which honors those killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, the Auschwitz Memorial  and the Neishlos Foundation, a charitable organization. Together they aim to restore 8,000 shoes from children killed at Auschwitz. The project is called "Soul to Sole" and is seeking funding from the public as well, with donations large and small.

A special conservation lab is already operational at the Auschwitz Memorial. Eitan Neishlos, whose foundation is one of those funding the project, says these remnants of lives lost are an "incredible archive of information." He hopes with the shoe restoration, "I really hope that we will do an exceptional job to draw those stories out and most importantly, to share them with the entire world."

Neishlos' grandmother survived the Holocaust and he inherited a shoebox of her memories. Now he considers it his duty to help other families recover as much of their own history as possible.

"I saw one shoe that had the word 'Cinderella' on the bottom and I thought, who was the Cinderella in that shoe and who were the princes in those shoes?" Neishlos told DW. "It's the duty of my generation and on behalf of the children and grandchildren and even great grandchildren of the survivors, to hold the torch of memory high."

Lessons not learned

"If we didn't display what happened, if we didn't preserve the testimony of what happened, it could happen again," Arie Pinsker says. But as he walks through the barracks that still remain, he fears that memories of the horrors humans inflicted on one another there have not served as a deterrent. 

"Human hatred is still everywhere," Pinsker laments. "You only have to see what is happening in Ukraine with Putin to understand that when there is a dictator who can decide anything, anything can happen."

He has been back to Auschwitz now more than 70 times — and says it would have been more without COVID-19 — and says he won't stop trying to make sure future world leaders take the right steps.

Edited by: Rob Mudge