News

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.

The sixth session in the postgraduate course on Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust, organized by the Museum’s International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, was held from July 3 to 11. .

In July, the International Center for Education on Auschwitz and the Holocaust is organizing the now traditional two-week seminar titled Auschwitz in the Collective Consciousness in Poland and around the World. Israeli teachers, staff from the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute in Jerusalem, and leaders of Israeli groups that visit Poland will attend.