News

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.

At the behest of the International Auschwitz Council Preservation Commission, the third stage of work to secure the ruins of Gas Chamber II at the Birkenau site has begun in accordance with the plan developed last year.

Over 370 thousand persons visited in groups the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Antoni Stanczyk from the Museum tourists section said Wednesday, stressing that such big number of visitors has not been recorded since the 1970s.

July 6 marks the anniversary of the first escape of a prisoner from the Auschwitz German camp. He was a Pole named Tadeusz Wiejowski (prisoner number 220). In reprisal, the Nazis made the prisoners line up in a roll call assembly and kept them standing for 20 hours. A Jewish prisoner, Dawid Wongczewski, died during the roll call and became the first fatal victim of Auschwitz.

This is the first broad-scale attempt at establishng the number of civilians from within the borders of the prewar Olkusz powiat who became victims of the Nazi concentration camps and interrogation cells during World War II.

The meeting in Warsaw (June 20-21) was largely devoted to matters connected with the work of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.