News

At a meeting in Oświęcim, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Council unanimously approved a report on the work of the institution in 2009 and its plans for 2010. The meeting also devoted a great of time to discussing ways to protect the Museum from the threat of floods.

In this edition of Oś Magazine you will find three interviews. We spoke i.a. to a French photographer Emmanuel Berry, whose works were presented at the exhibition at block 12 on the site of the former Auschwitz I camp.

A group of several dozen Silesian district directors of the Prison Service were at the Auschwitz Museum for a one-day seminar “Auschwitz—history—civic education”, done in cooperation with the International Center for Education About Auschwitz and the Holocaust and the Prison Service. Representatives from all jails and prisons located in Śląsk visited the Museum site and learned about the Museum’s collection as well as watched selected documentaries showing Auschwitz in films.

Intense efforts has been made to protect the site of the former Nazi German Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp against flooding.

The site of the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and extermination center is in the area at risk of flooding caused by recent heavy rains in southern Poland. In view of the flood warning, the Museum has decided to close its gates to visitors and to take steps to safeguard the collections, archives, and the specialist equipment in the conservation laboratories.

The main focus of this edition of Oś is a book of fairy tales. The book is extraordinary not for its content, but due to the fact that the stories of the “Adventures of the Black Chick,” “The Fairy Tale about the Hare, Fox, and Rooster,” “The Giant-Egoist,” and the “Wedding in Osy Wielkie” were created behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz.