News

Thirty-five students from the Forestry and Ecology School Complex in Brynek spent two weeks at the Museum in September. As they do each year, the students concentrated on removing the wild-growth trees and bushes that spring up on the Museum grounds as a result of the natural expansion of vegetation.

Twenty-five Polish educators—Museum guides, teachers, and staff from martyrdom museums—are taking part from September 18 to October 2 in a seminar, which has become a tradition, at the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute in Israel.

Preparations have begun for a new Belgian permanent exhibition at the Auschwitz I site (Block no. 20). The appropriate Belgian cabinet minister has commissioned the Museum of Deportation and the Resistance Movement in Mechelen (Malines) to design the project, which will be completed in cooperation with the Auschwitz Museum. Belgian soldiers have arrived in Oświęcim and will spend several weeks dismantling the old exhibition.

September 15 was the 64th anniversary of the establishment of the Russisches Kriegsgefagenen Arbeitslager, or labor camp for Soviet prisoners of war, in Auschwitz. The Nazis treated the captured Soviet soldiers with exceptional harshness. Only a handful survived out of a total of around 15,000 held at Auschwitz.

Preservation work on one of the wooden barracks at the site of the men’s quarantine camp in Birkenau sector BIIa will continue until October.

After 60 years, a metal rack used to load victims’ remains into the furnaces has been excavated adjacent to the ruins of crematorium and gas chamber V. For years, only part of a handle protruded from the ground; everything else lay buried almost a meter below the surface.