News

This year we marked the 65th anniversary of the liquidation by the Nazis of the so-called Gypsy family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the night of August 2/3, 1944, the Nazis murdered 2,897 men, women, and children in the gas chamber—the last of the approximately 23 thousand Roma deported to Auschwitz. In Oś you will find extensive coverage of the observances, fragments of accounts recalling the events of 65 years ago, and information about a new volume in the Voices of Memory series, dedicated to the story of the Roma prisoners of Auschwitz.

Ehud Barak, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of Israel, visited the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum with Mrs. Barak on October 15.

A new “Remembrance Trail” project carried out by the community of Brzeszcze in cooperation with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and other institutions is dedicated to the remembrance of the prisoners of the Jawischowitz and Buda subcamps of Auschwitz, and the local residents who aided them.

A historic train car has been placed at the ramp (unloading platform) at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site. Beginning in the spring of 1944, Jews deported to Auschwitz by the Germans disembarked and underwent selection by SS doctors there.

The outlook for building a modern center to serve visitors to the Auschwitz Memorial is improving. The Local Government Appeals Board has reversed in its entirety a ruling by Oświęcim President Janusz Marszałek, who had refused to issue construction guidelines for the work at the site of the PKSiS bus garage. Marszałek had suspended the administrative proceeding for one year, citing work on a new municipal zoning ordinance.

The President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, visited the site of the Nazi German Auschwitz Concentration Camp together with his predecessor, Hans-Gert Pöttering. Paying tribute to the victims, Buzek said that “everyone who comes here experiences this human tragedy anew. I have been here several times myself, but it does not matter if we come here for the fifth or the tenth time. It is always a profound experience, and we are never unmoved when we leave. This is the great hope—that the millions of people who have visited Auschwitz since the war will remember the place and remember what it warns about.”