It was an ordinary working day in the Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum conservation workshop, where dozens of employees were busy working on suitcases, children's shoes and old letters written by the prisoners to their loved ones. Their mission to help preserve the objects for as long as possible while maintaining their authenticity is a hefty task.

The irrefutable evidence of Hitler's crimes continues to shock the two million or so people who every year visit the most barbarous of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps that was constructed in 1940 on the outskirts of the Polish commune of Oswiecim, annexed by the Third Reich and infamously expanded in 1942 to execute the Final Solution on an industrial scale in the gas chambers and crematoria of Birkenau.

Most of the owners of the hundreds of thousands of objects currently preserved on site were among the 1,100,000 victims (of which one million were Jews) who perished at the site. And soon only their personal effects will remain to bear witness to the Nazis' barbarism, as Nel Jastrzebiowska, the deputy head of the museum's conservation laboratories said: "Those who survived this hell here are gradually disappearing, and soon these objects will speak for them. They evoke the lives of those who owned them, and whose memory we must preserve."

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