As to the house, the plan is for it to open to the public in time for the 80th anniversary commemorations. Work to turn part of the property into a museum and the rest into a workspace will take many months, the Counter Extremism Project says. “Everyone has or can relate to the “house next door.” But today hatred lurks with ubiquity in houses as close to us as next door. House 88 will take up the fight against destructive hatred, and against extremism and antisemitism,” Ambassador Mark D. Wallace said. The first thing members of the Counter Extremism project did was to attach a mezuzah to the front door, as a way of both reclaiming the house and opening it to all.

The house at 88 Legionow Street is imposing and ugly on the outside, but functional and spacious within. With temperatures below freezing and snow thick on the ground, visitors really notice the blast of warm air coming from the radiators when they walk through the door. It is what Nazi mass murderer Rudolf Höss would have felt after a day of ‘work’ just a few hundred feet away at the most notorious factory of death in history… The property is set to be turned into a weapon for good after being bought by the US-based Counter Extremism Project, who will transform it into a key pillar of their bid to combat radicalisation and violence.

Ambassador Mark D. Wallace added that CEP planned to convert the house and the one next door into the base of a new organization called ‘Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization.’ Daniel Libeskind, an American architect, has been commissioned to redesign the property. Libeskind told NYT that he envisages turning the interior of the house into “a void, an abyss,” but will leave the external walls untouched as a UNESCO preservation order protects them. “A house is a house,” said Jacek Purski., who is involved in the project. “But it is in uninteresting, regular houses like this where extremism is happening today…

A mezuzah, a parchment containing biblical verses, has been attached to the front door frame to honor Jewish tradition — and repudiate the fanaticism of its former occupant, the Auschwitz commander…The plan, Ambassador Mark D. Wallace said, is to turn the house, along with the adjacent property, into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, a new organization that will work to expand the pledge of “Never Again” from historical memory to current action.