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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.

Twenty graduates of the year-long course on Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust received their diplomas on Saturday. The classes are held at the Museum under the supervision of the Cracow Pedagogical Academy. The lecturers come from the Museum staff and the Jagiellonian, Warsaw, and Silesian universities. There are 40 students from Poznań, Warsaw, and Cracow enrolled in the course this year.

Tuesday marked the 59th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp by the Soviet Army. The observances began with a “March of Silence” through the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum on Monday.

The Municipal Tourist Information Point in Oświęcim has been moved from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to the Maja Tourist Service center, several hundred meters away. The decision was taken by Oświęcim mayor Janusz Marszałek.

An educational session for post-intermediate-school teachers and students on the fate of Jewish children rescued during the Holocaust, their lives after the war, and the attitudes of the Polish public to the Shoah was held on November 28. Organized by the Museum Education Center, the session accompanied a visit to the Museum by Krystyna Budnicka, Anna Drabik, Elżbieta Ficowska, and Joanna Sobolewska-Pyz, members of the Polish Children of the Holocaust Association.

In May 2002, Fritjof Meyer, a journalist with the influential German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, published an article titled “Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz. Neue Erkentnisse durch neue Archivfunde” (The Number of Victims of Auschwitz: New Findings in the Light of Newly-Discovered Documents) in the German scholarly journal Osteuropa. Meyer does not deny the existence of the gas chambers, but he lowers the number of people murdered in Auschwitz to approximately 510,000.