Auschwitz

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The Nazi concentration and extermination camp built in occupied Poland during the Second World War ; the town in southern Poland, known in Polish as Oświęcim, where that camp was located
2. A notorious Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland where millions were murdered during the Holocaust ; the southern Polish town near Kraków where the camp was established
3. The infamous wartime extermination camp operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland ; the Polish town, called Oświęcim locally, that gave its German name to the site

Etymology: The word is the German name of a town in southern Poland, Oświęcim, which the Nazis occupied and renamed Auschwitz after invading in 1939. The town was known to Poles by its Polish name, and German usage supplied the name that later became a byword for the camps built nearby. A reader might assume the place name was chosen to sound sinister, but it was simply the German rendering of the existing town, and the camp complex took its name from the town's location. English borrowed the word from German, so its meaning now depends entirely on what happened there rather than on anything in the name itself. Used on its own, it refers to the Nazi concentration and extermination camp complex, and it is used as a shorthand for the Holocaust as a whole. Because the place is now bound so tightly to that history, the town's own identity, with its Polish name and centuries of prior life, is easily overlooked when the word is spoken.