Living in a Nazi death camp

Residents of the Austrian village of Gusen live on the foundations of a former concentration camp. Until recently no one spoke about the town's past, but an audio tour by an artist who was born there is changing that.

The route of the 100-minute audio tour, which opened last week, takes the visitor through Gusen I, the camp built to house mostly Polish, Spanish and Russian prisoners. It wends its way past the pink three-storey façades of today's Parkstrasse, where a village teacher during a wartime visit to the dentist recounts blundering into an execution of children tied in sacks.

Further down, at number 3 Parkstrasse, a cream, two-storey house is now on the site where Gusen's makeshift gas chamber once stood.

"Commander [SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Karl] Chmielewski had a welcoming speech for us," one Polish survivor who lives in the UK, but wishes to remain anonymous, recalled. "He said 'For you there is only one way out from here. Through the chimney'."

The Anne Frank file

The YIVO Institute reveals a cache of correspondence detailing the Frank family's efforts to emigrate to the United States.

I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see the U.S.A. is the only country we could go to. Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance.

~ Letter from Otto Frank to Nathan Straus Jr.

Leica's Schindler

Ernst Leitz, the owner of the camera factory, who helped numerous Jews escape Hitler's Germany.

Leitz's humanitarian efforts on behalf of Wetzlar's Jews began within days of Hitler's rise to power in March 1933 and continued through Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Jewish businesses and synagogues were systematically looted. Leitz's secret campaign only ended in 1939, when Hitler's invasion of Poland resulted in the closure of Germany's borders.

Typically, young Jewish men like Rosenberg would be offered apprenticeships at Wetzlar. Then, after varying periods of training, they would be transferred to New York and put to work in the Fifth Avenue showroom or associated dealerships across the US. Leitz paid all the bills for their travel, and his executives furnished the refugees with letters of introduction and helped them obtain visas.

Incredibly, it is only now that the full story of the Leica escape routes is emerging. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that Leitz, a modest and close-lipped Protestant businessman, never spoke about the Nazi period in public, and even kept his good works secret from his family.

"One of the marks of the true altruist is that they don't parade their works, they just get on with it," says Smith. "From Ernst Leitz's point of view, he was only doing what any decent person would have done in his position."