What it's like to live next to the world's most notorious concentration camp
Locals says living near Auschwitz concentration camp is "kind of a burden". (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
On a snowy February night, I'm in the basement of a building that once housed German factory workers in Nazi-occupied Poland.
It's quiet, the sounds of the street muffled by the enormous concrete slab above.
The room was designed as a shelter, built to withstand an allied bombing raid, but now it's been transformed.
"This is it," my host Miroslaw Ganobis says.
"This is my collection."
A vast array of bottles, books, paintings and signs line the walls.
Each item in this amateur museum tells a small part of the story of Oswiecim, a place known around the world by its infamous German name, Auschwitz.
"Living here is difficult, people always associate here with evil," Mr Ganobis says, as he shows me several items.
We are speaking just a few kilometres from the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau — the site where an estimated 1.1 million people perished.
The camp is now a museum, which has attracted more than 2 million tourists in recent years.
Miroslaw Ganobis says people associate his hometown Oswiecim with evil. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
But not many visit or know much about the town of Oswiecim.
"The concentration camp is kind of a burden," Mr Ganobis says.
"Sometimes people even ask, how can you live here at the biggest cemetery in the world?
"But they don't understand that this town has a rich history, going back 800 years. I want people to remember that, my family has been here for generations.
"Before the Nazis came this place was sometimes called Oswiecim-Jerusalem [because of the town's Jewish population]. People lived together in harmony and I want to protect the whole story of this town, not just the camp."
Each item in Miroslaw Ganobis' amateur museum tells a small part of the story of Oswiecim. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
There is a sense of resentment among some long-time locals.
A few claim the camp has stopped the town expanding or developing and others worry that uneducated visitors to the site may think Polish residents were responsible for Nazi crimes.
"We are making an effort to separate Oswiecim from Auschwitz," Andrzej Kacorzyk, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, says as we shelter from a particularly heavy snow flurry near the world-famous Arbeit Macht Frei sign.
Locals are determined that Hitler's Third Reich won't have the final say over how their town is remembered. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
"We do need to distinguish Oswiecim, a town in Poland, a town with several hundred years of history, a place with a wonderful history of Polish-Jewish fellowship, from the place that was called the Auschwitz concentration camp.
"This is really important."
Given the enormity of the horrors that took place at Auschwitz it seems a difficult, perhaps impossible, task.
But Mr Ganobis says he's determined that Hitler's brutal Third Reich won't have the final say over how his home town is remembered across the world.
"The view of the town is changing but very, very slowly. Visitors are becoming more aware," he says.
"We are starting more conversations, particularly with Israeli groups that visit, and they seem to welcome this.
"But it's going to take many more years of work."
Andrzej Kacorzyk at the world-famous Arbeit Macht Frei sign. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
