News

The St. Maksymilian Center in Harmęże held ceremonies on August 14 to mark the 64th anniversary of the saint’s death in Auschwitz.

Roman Kwiatkowski, president of the Association of Roma in Poland, appealed for the remembrance of the victims of the Roma Holocaust during Tuesday’s Roma Extermination Day ceremonies at the Auschwitz-II Birkenau site, marking the 61st anniversary of the liquidation of the Gypsy Camp.

August 2 marks the 61st anniversary of the liquidation of the so-called Gypsy Family Camp in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp. On that day in 1944, the Nazis killed 2,897 men, women, and children in the gas chambers. August 2 has been observed since 1997 as Roma Extermination Remembrance Day.

This book by Lucyna Filip, from the staff of the Archives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, has been published as Juden in Oświęcim 1918-1941. It is an expanded German version of her Żydzi w Oświęcimiu 1918-1941, published in 2003.

July marks 64 years since the deportation of the first Soviet POWs to the German Auschwitz camp. Several hundred POWs arrived in the first contingent. A total of more than 15,000 were sent to the camp over the course of World War II. Fewer than 100 of them survived. The Nazis treated the POWs with exceptional barbarity.

A new parking lot is to be opened near the Auschwitz-II Birkenau site. Oświęcim commune wójt Andrzej Bibrzycki said on Wednesday that the zoning laws require that it be built a certain distance from the site. The present parking lot, immediately adjacent to the historical Birkenau main gate, will be removed.