User:Khazar2/legacy

Legacy
In the decades since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust. Snyder attributes this to the camp's high death toll as well as its "unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility", which left behind far more witnesses than single-purpose killing facilities such as Chelmno or Treblinka. On the fiftieth anniversary of the camp's liberation, German chancellor Helmut Kohl described it as the "darkest and most horrific chapter of German history".

Notable memoirists of the camp include Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski. In If This Is a Man, Levi wrote that the concentration camps represented the epitome of the totalitarian system: "[N]ever has there existed a state that was really 'totalitarian.' ... Never has some form of reaction, a corrective of the total tyranny, been lacking, not even in the Third Reich or Stalin's Soviet Union: in both cases, public opinion, the magistrature, the foreign press, the churches, the feeling for justice and humanity that ten or twenty years of tyranny were not enough to eradicate, have to a greater or lesser extent acted as a brake. Only in the Lager [camp] was the restraint from below non-existent, and the power of these small satraps absolute."

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl drew on his imprisonment at Auschwitz in composing Man's Search for Meaning (1946), one of the most widely read works about the camp. A existentialist work, the book argues that individuals can find purpose even among great suffering, and that this sense of purpose sustains them. Elie Wiesel wrote about his own imprisonment at Auschwitz in Night (1960) and other works, and became a prominent spokesman against ethnic violence. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Camp survivor Simone Veil was President of the European Parliament from 1979–82. Two Auschwitz victims&mdash;Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who volunteered to die by starvation in place of a stranger, and Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism&mdash;were later named saints of the Roman Catholic Church.