The large walls full of portraits conceal the stories trapped in the camps and in the nooks and crannies of the memory of those who saw and experienced the horror at first hand. The deportees' large faces look out at us, question us, beseech us to remember and to tell.
If you put your ear to the wall, you can hear the voices and stories of the survivors, of those who have taken it upon themselves to tell us of their suffering. Some of the eye-witnesses who came back from Auschwitz accompany younger visitors in their determination to hand the memory down to new witnesses.
Three screens show the faces of the students who thought up and devised the tour and who, with their accounts, are setting in motion this new, yet absolutely crucial, form of memory.
The tour continues with three in-depth analyses: one devoted to the design of the "machinery of extermination" and the planning of scientific experiments; another to the linguistic jargon, the "Lagersprache", that allowed the inmates to survive in a place where failing to understand or to make oneself understood could lead to being shot on the spot; and the third to the attempt to recover the countless identities recorded as mere serial numbers. In this room it is up to the visitor to draw close to the monitors and to help the inmates' lost identity to resurface.