News

District Court in Oswiecim found Kazimierz Switon guilty of slandering the Polish sejm (parliament). Switon gained notoriety in 1999 for placing crosses in the "gravel pit." Residents of Oswiecim filed a "suspicion of the commission of a crime by Kazimierz Switon" with the public prosecutor last spring. They felt that the fliers that Switon affixed to the fence around the gravel pit and distributed to visitors contained slanderous formulations about the Sejm, as well as about Germans and Jews.

"Seeing..." is the third and last part of a planned cycle of exhibitions from the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The intention is to show Auschwitz through artistic forms created under varying conditions by eyewitnesses, as well as by artists who were not directly affected by the brutality of Auschwitz.

To mark the approaching 55th anniversary of Auschwitz concentration camp, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum organized a contest for students at artistic secondary schools all over Poland. They were asked to make a poster on the theme "The Memory of Auschwitz."

Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek announced that the International Auschwitz Council was now set up.

Under an agreement signed last December between the German Federal Land of Lower Saxony (representing the German Länder) and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, work will begin in 2000 on the preservation of the perimeter fence at the site of Auschwitz concentration camp (Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau).

There are five drawings, in charcoal, on the wall of a building in Goleszow that housed an Auschwitz sub-camp during the Second World War.