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On January 27, 2009, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum will hold ceremonies marking the 64th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German Auschwitz camp by the Red Army. This year’s observance, with the theme To Hear Every Word, will be dedicated to the message to the younger generation from the eyewitnesses to history. The focal point of the ceremony will be a meeting with the former prisoners who tell their story to the world.

A work by Auschwitz prisoner Tadeusz Myszkowski is the latest addition to the Museum art collection. It is a caricature of another prisoner, Jan Kowalski, camp number 99. Like Myszkowski, Kowalski came from Zakopane, and the two were related. The Germans arrested the two men in 1939 over caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini—Myszkowski for drawing them, and Kowalski for displaying them in public in the Empire café.

The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust has published the proceedings of the international conference on Remembrance, Awareness and Responsibility, held last year on the 60th anniversary of the opening of the State Museum at the site of the Nazi Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Ombudsmen from all over the world assembled in Oświęcim on December 4. They took part in a session marking the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and International Human Rights Day. The honorary patrons were the President of the Polish Republic, Lech Kaczyński, and the Chairman of the European Commission, Manuel Barroso.

About 200 young people from 40 countries who are taking part in the Solidarity Express program visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on December 2. They viewed the exhibits in block 4, devoted to the Holocaust, and block 5, with its collection of evidence of Nazi crime including human hair, prostheses, shoes, and suitcases with names on them. They also visited block 11, known as the Death Block, and the Death Wall, the crematorium I building at the Auschwitz Main Camp site, and the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site, where the mass killing of Jews took place.

Ladies and Gentlemen,On the 29th of March, acting upon a motion submitted by Professor Władysław Bartoszewski, I appointed you members of the International Auschwitz Council, the continuation of a council once established by the former Minister of Culture and Art, Izabela Cywińska. I wish to most cordially thank all those who have been members of the council for nearly a decade for their enormous, unselfish effort and dedication, for helping to solve so many problems and for alleviating the tensions and conflicts arising along the way.