AUSCHWITZ-OSWIECIM

The Hidden City in the East

Hans Citroen and Barbara Starzynska

Artist Hans Citroen and architect Barbara Starzynska look anew at one of the planet’s most highly charged sites: the Auschwitz death camp and the Polish town of Oswiecim. In the process, the authors investigate how time re-writes and redefines the history of a place, exploring how we write history, and the meaning of collective memory. This striking, Japanese-style book mixes images and text, featuring Citroen’s contemporary views from front-to-back, and Starzynska’s blackand- white historical documentation when reversed. More than a million visitors a year come to see the wartime remains, creating a complicated engagement among pilgrims, tourists, survivors and residents. “A page-turner about the afterlife of a death camp?” asks Auschwitz scholar Robert Jan van Pelt. The authors “have made me see both wartime Auschwitz and today’s Oswiecim anew.”

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