News

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.

We are pleased to announce the opening of the First International Summer Academy organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland, as part of educational programs offered by its International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Several hundred residents of the Oświęcim area have gathered at the grave of the Soviet POWs in Brzezinka to pay tribute to the victims of the air disaster on April 10 that claimed the lives of Polish President Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, and 94 others. They also paid homage to all Poles murdered in the East during the Second World War, in Katyń and elsewhere, and too Soviet soldiers murdered by the Nazi Germans in Auschwitz.

The office of the procurator in Cracow has dropped its investigation into any possible negligence by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum administration. The investigation was opened after the theft of the Arbeit macht frei sign over the gate at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German concentration camp and extermination center.