News

The Mechelen Museum of Deportation and the Resistance in Malines, the central institution for Holocaust research in Belgium, has presented the Museum with a data base containing information on 10,000 people of Jewish origin who lived in Belgium during the Nazi occupation.

The last session in this year's postgraduate course on "Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust," organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in cooperation with the National Education Commission Academy of Pedagogy in Cracow, ended on Friday, July 5. Thirty-two teachers of history and Polish, mostly from Małopolska province, participated in the course this year. The formal closing ceremony and awarding of diplomas will be held in Oświęcim on September 7.

The City Tourist Information Point has opened at the Museum. Its staff will offer practical help and encourage them to visit the city of Oświęcim and learn about its 800-year history.

Location shooting for the film Der kleine Birkenhain (The Birch Grove) has been underway at the site of the Birkenau camp for almost a fortnight. It is the story of a former Auschwitz prisoner who undertakes a journey, decades after the war, into her traumatic past. One of the places she returns to is Birkenau, to which, at the age of fourteen, the Nazis deported her from the Drancy, France camp in April, 1944, because she was Jewish.

The Museum parking lot at the Birkenau site is now monitored around the clock. The parking lot is used by visitors to the site of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp. The electronic surveillance will mean a significant increase in security for guests and their vehicles.

On June 14, 1940, the Nazis sent a group of 729 Polish men (including approximately 20 Jews) from the prison in Tarnów to the newly opened Auschwitz Concentration Camp.