Today marks a significant and bittersweet moment in human history and for my people - the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. It is a day that has been internationally commemorated as Holocaust Memorial Day.
Over the past couple of years I have begun investing into building a Holocaust Memorial artifact collection in my Prehistoria Museum. In the past year, these two armbands were among the relics entered into my memorial collection.
One bears the striking, and immediately-recognizable, yellow Star of David. The letter "J", symbolizing Jude (Jew). It was a legal requirement for all Jewish people in occupied territories to wear their identifying markers.
The second armband depicts a Star of David composed of a yellow and a purple triangle. The yellow symbolizes the wearer as Jewish, the purple as Jehovah's Witness. Thus, this prisoner was marked as Jehovah's Witness of Jewish descent.
In 1944, this individual was interred in Auschwitz Camp 8 - a slave labour camp involved in domestic coal production.
An estimated 1.3 million poor souls were herded like cattle into the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps, many passing beneath the eternally chilling slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" - translating to "Work Sets You Free."
1.1 million of these men, women and children would never leave.
In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, the Nazi leadership laid out an official policy for the deliberate, systemic and efficient genocide of the Jewish people. This policy was titled "die Endlösung der Judenfrage" or the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" officially setting the Holocaust in motion, murdering 90% of Poland's Jewish population and two-thirds of all Jews across Europe.
The Nazi government determined that death by firing squad would waste too much of the ammunition and resources needed for the frontlines, so the death camps were built for maximum efficiency.
The air would have often been thick with a noxious smoke - the cremated fumes of friends, families and peers, bellowing from upto five separate crematoriums running practically 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
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