Sent: 31 Jan 2017
Arrived: 17 Feb 2017
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska: the Mannerist Architectural and Park Landscape Complex and Pilgrimage Park
UNESCO site
Date of Inscription: 1990
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska is a breathtaking cultural landscape
of great spiritual significance. Its natural setting – in which a series of
symbolic places of worship relating to the Passion of Jesus Christ and the life
of the Virgin Mary was laid out at the beginning of the 17th century – has
remained virtually unchanged. It is still today a place of pilgrimage.
Criterion (ii): Kalwaria Zebrzydowska is an exceptional
cultural monument in which the natural landscape was used as the setting for a
symbolic representation in the form of chapels and avenues of the events of the
Passion of Christ. The result is a cultural landscape of great beauty and
spiritual quality in which natural and man-made elements combine in a
harmonious manner.
Criterion (iv): The Counter Reformation in the late 16th
century led to a flowering in the creation of Calvaries in Europe. Kalwaria
Zebrzydowska is an outstanding example of this type of large-scale landscape
design, which incorporates natural beauty with spiritual objectives and the
principles of Baroque park design.
Sent: 31 Jan 2017
Arrived: 17 Feb 2017
Auschwitz Birkenau
UNESCO site
Date of Inscription: 1979
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the principal and most notorious of
the six concentration and extermination camps established by Nazi Germany to
implement its Final Solution policy which had as its aim the mass murder of the
Jewish people in Europe. Built in Poland under Nazi German occupation initially
as a concentration camp for Poles and later for Soviet prisoners of war, it soon
became a prison for a number of other nationalities. Between the years
1942-1944 it became the main mass extermination camp where Jews were tortured
and killed for their so-called racial origins. In addition to the mass murder
of well over a million Jewish men, women and children, and tens of thousands of
Polish victims, Auschwitz also served as a camp for the racial murder of
thousands of Roma and Sinti and prisoners of several European nationalities.
The Nazi policy of spoliation, degradation and extermination
of the Jews was rooted in a racist and anti-Semitic ideology propagated by the
Third Reich.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the concentration camp
complexes created by the Nazi German regime and was the one which combined
extermination with forced labour. At the centre of a huge landscape of human
exploitation and suffering, the remains of the two camps of Auschwitz I and
Auschwitz II-Birkenau, as well as its Protective Zone were placed on the World
Heritage List as evidence of this inhumane, cruel and methodical effort to deny
human dignity to groups considered inferior, leading to their systematic
murder. The camps are a vivid testimony to the murderous nature of the
anti-Semitic and racist Nazi policy that brought about the annihilation of more
than 1.2 million people in the crematoria, 90% of whom were Jews.
The fortified walls, barbed wire, railway sidings,
platforms, barracks, gallows, gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau
show clearly how the Holocaust, as well as the Nazi German policy of mass
murder and forced labour took place. The collections at the site preserve the
evidence of those who were premeditatedly murdered, as well as presenting the
systematic mechanism by which this was done. The personal items in the collections
are testimony to the lives of the victims before they were brought to the
extermination camps, as well as to the cynical use of their possessions and
remains. The site and its landscape has high levels of authenticity and
integrity since the original evidence has been carefully conserved without any
unnecessary restoration.
Criterion (vi): be directly or tangibly associated with
events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and
literary works of outstanding universal value.
Auschwitz – Birkenau, monument to the deliberate genocide of
the Jews by the Nazi regime (Germany 1933-1945) and to the deaths of countless
others bears irrefutable evidence to one of the greatest crimes ever
perpetrated against humanity. It is also a monument to the strength of the
human spirit which in appalling conditions of adversity resisted the efforts of
the German Nazi regime to suppress freedom and free thought and to wipe out
whole races. The site is a key place of memory for the whole of humankind for
the holocaust, racist policies and barbarism; it is a place of our collective
memory of this dark chapter in the history of humanity, of transmission to
younger generations and a sign of warning of the many threats and tragic
consequences of extreme ideologies and denial of human dignity.
Thank you so much maryellie!
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