News

As happens each year, candles were lighted on the graves in the cemetery at Brzeszcze on All Saints' Day. Columns of Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoners passed right by this cemetery on January 18, 1945. That final evacuation of the camp is known as the Death March. More than 10,000 of the 50,000 prisoners evacuated are estimated to have died then—just a few days before the arrival of the Red Army, which liberated the camp on January 27.

For two weeks a group of more than thirty people—Polish and history teachers, museum staffers, Auschwitz Museum guides, and two priests—attended a training course organized by Yad Vashem. This memorial institute in Israel has been commemorating the Destruction of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II for almost fifty years.

A new plaque has been added to the Monument to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp Victims at the site of the Birkenau camp. It was placed where the plaque in English (now moved to the far side of the monument) used to be. The language on the new plaque is the traditional language of Sephardic Jews.

On October 4, 2002, the Museum archives were enriched by a copy of 200 volumes of records from the Criminal Case against Mulka et al. Twenty-four persons accused of committing crimes in Auschwitz, including Robert Mulka, the former adjutant to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, went on trial in Frankfurt am Main in 1963. Six of the defendants were sentenced to the most severe penalty available under German Federal Republic law—life imprisonment—and the others were sentenced to prison sentences ranging from three to fourteen years.

A book launch for Księga Pamięci. Transporty Polaków do KL Auschwitz z Krakowa i innych miejscowości Polski południowej w l. 1940-1944 [Memorial Book: Transports of Poles to Auschwitz Concentration Camp from Cracow and Other Localities in Southern Poland from 1940 to 1944] was held in the gallery of nineteenth-century Polish art at the Cloth Hall in Cracow.

Auschwitz Prisoner Labor: The Organization and Exploitation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp Prisoners as Laborers (the English version of Zatrudnienie więźniów KL Auschwitz. Organizacja pracy i metody eksploatacji siły roboczej) by Franciszek Piper, the head of the Historical Research Department at the Museum, has been published.