News

Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz today named Professor Władysław Bartoszewski Chairman of the International Auschwitz Council, whose previous term of office expired in February.

About 6,000 Jews from 20 countries will take part in the March of the Living, according to the organizers. The March will be held on April 25. Participants will arrive at the Auschwitz Museum in the morning. After a short prayer and speeches, the participants will form up at approximately 1:00 PM and march through Leszczyńska, Męczeństwa Narodów, and Ofiar Faszyzmu Streets to the site of the Birkenau camp.

Judges from the Constitutional Tribunal of the Polish Republic and the Constitutional Court of the Italian Republic made a joint visit to the Museum on Friday, March 31. They toured the site of the German concentration camp and laid wreaths at the Death Wall in Auschwitz and the Monument to Victims of the Camp in Birkenau.

March 26 marked the 64th anniversary of the first transport of women to the German Auschwitz camp. There were 999 female prisoners on the first train from Ravensbrueck Concentration Camp. Most of them were criminals and “asocials.” There were also between ten and twenty political prisoners among them. On that same day, the Germans also transported 999 Jewish women to the camp from Poprad in Slovakia.

A precise definition of the faiths of the people deported to Auschwitz is no simple matter, mostly because of the lack of source materials. Most of the people deported to Auschwitz were never registered in the camp, and the Nazis destroyed most of the records containing information on prisoners before the Russians liberated the camp in January 1945.

Polish prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz attended the final session during the present term of office of the International Auschwitz Council on February 27, 2006. The meeting covered ongoing affairs at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and a summing-up of the Council’s six-year tenure. Marcinkiewicz thanked the current members and presented them with diplomas to mark their membership. “I am convinced that all the issues that are important for the International Council will continue to be handled in a way that prompts remembrance on the one hand, and that looks to the future on the other. Remembrance has tremendous significance in building a good future,” said the Prime Minister.