Edvard Munch created the four versions in various media. The National Gallery in Oslo, Norway, holds one of two painted versions (1893). The Munch Museum holds the other painted version (1910) and a pastel version from 1893.
The fourth version (pastel, 1895) was sold for $119,922,600 at Sothebys Impressionist and Modern Art auction on 2 May 2012 to financier Leon Black, the fourth highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction.
Auschwitz concentration camp was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I (the original concentration camp), Auschwitz IIBirkenau (a combination concentration/extermination camp), Auschwitz IIIMonowitz (a labor camp to staff an IG Farben factory), and 45 satellite camps.
Auschwitz IIBirkenau went on to become a major site of the Nazis Final Solution to the Jewish Question during the Holocaust. From early 1942 until late 1944, transport trains delivered Jews to the camps gas chambers from all over German-occupied Europe, where they were killed en masse with the cyanide-based poison Zyklon B, originally developed to be used as a pesticide. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died. Around 90 percent of those were Jews; approximately one in six Jews killed in the Holocaust died at the camp. Others deported to Auschwitz included 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Romani and Sinti, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 400 Jehovahs Witnesses, and tens of thousands of others of diverse nationalities, including an unknown number of homosexuals. Many of those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.