News

A discussion on the concept for a total makeover of the Jewish exhibition in block 27 at the Auschwitz Memorial was held at the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem on August 31, 2010. Participants included former prisoners, Holocaust survivors, historians, and experts from many countries, including Professor Israel Gutman, Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Ruth Bondi, Moshe Safdie, Shulamit Imber, Natan Sharanski, Michael Berenbaum, Marian Turski, Henryk Noah Flug, and the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński. Avner Shalev, the director of Yad Vashem, hosted the experts, and Elie Wiesel oversaw the work of the whole group.

A unique collection of over 150 medical implements was donated to the Auschwitz-Birkenau. The tools were found after the liberation of the Nazi German concentration and extermination camp, within the area that was closed and inaccessible from outside, the camp interest zone (so-called “Interessengebiet”), close to the train station in Oświęcim. They were in private hands for over 60 years and through a local collector and enthusiast of history they were just donated to the Museum.

A group of 20 history teachers from secondary schools and university lecturers from 10 regions of the Ukraine visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Site. August 14-20, the teachers took part in an educational seminar entitled, “The history of the Holocaust in the Ukraine and Poland”.

Almost 2,000 people took part in ceremonies marking the sixty-ninth anniversary of the death of St. Maximilian Kolbe at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp.

In May and June we watched with fear clouded sky and the rising level of rivers around Oświęcim. For the first time in many years the Museum was closed to visitors and archives and collections had to be moved onto higher levels. The real battle with water took place at the site of Birkenau, where water from a nearby river Pławianka almost broke through the barrier. Flood is the main theme in this issue of the magazine.

Ceremonies marking the Day of Remembrance for the Exterminaton of the Roma were held on the sixty-sixth anniversary of the liquidation of the Familienzigeunerlager, the so-called family camp for Sinti and Roma in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp. The several hundred people in attendance included former prisoners of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps and ghettos, Roma from Poland and abroad, government officials including Minister Elżbieta Radziszewska as the representative of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, representatives of the European Commission, members of the diplomatic corps, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and members of the staff, and local officials.