News

Stanisław Ryniak, an engineer from Wrocław, Poland, will never again travel to Oświęcim to take part—as he did each year—in commemorative observances at the Museum. The first political prisoner in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Ryniak died recently in Wrocław at the age of 88 and was buried in Osobowicki Cemetery there.

The annual seven-week-long course for guides at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim has begun. It is intended to enhance the guides’ techniques and command of the subject matter.

Simone Veil, chairwoman of the French Shoah Memorial Foundation, has informed the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum of a decision to award the Museum 40,000 euro as a subsidy for the translation into French and publication in that language of the “big Auschwitz monograph” – a collective work on the history of the Death Camp, written mostly by Museum research staff.

Are there fields of human ashes at the site of the camp? Who maintains the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial? Are the things you see there original? Are there fields of human ashes at the site of the camp? You can find answers to these and other questions in a  new module (in Polish for the time being), devoted to preservation issues at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp site, on the Museum website.

The British National Archive has released the first of five million World War II aerial reconnaissance photographs taken over occupied Europe by the RAF. The photos were placed on a special website, on January 19.

There has been no previous study devoted solely to the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the literature on Auschwitz Concentration Camp. This was partly due to the scarcity of extant documentation on their imprisonment, and the rarity of memoirs or accounts. Additionally, the small number of prisoners in category IBV (Internationale Bibelforscher-Vereinigung—International Association of Holy Scripture Researchers—the rubric used to register Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Nazi camps) meant that they were treated as anonymous members of one more category among the thousands of individuals who made up the prisoner population.