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MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU FORMER GERMAN NAZI
CONCENTRATION AND EXTERMINATION CAMP

News

Roma commemorated. The first exhibition in Poland on the Destruction of the Roma

02-08-2001
The Nazis "liquidated" the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp" in Birkenau on the night of August 1-2, 1944, murdering the three thousand Roma who were still alive there. From the winter of 1943 through the summer of 1944, nearly 23,000 Roma from over ten European countries were registered in the camp. Barely a thousand of them survived. On the fifty-seventh anniversary of this crime, the first permanent exhibition in Poland to provide full documentation of the destruction of the Roma was opened at the Museum in Block no. 13 at the Auschwitz I-Main Camp site). A similar exhibition has been in existence for several years at the Center for the Culture and Documentation of the German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, Germany.

It could have been worse than that. Floods and thunderstorms

30-07-2001
In mid-July, one well-placed thunderbolt struck the Museum telephone system and knocked out servers and modems, making it impossible to access the Museum website on the World Wide Web for two months and leaving half of the several hundred lines on the institution's switchboard dead. These problems have delayed the opening of the German-language version of the website, which had been planned for September.

Commercial service complex in vicinity of the Memorial. The Maja Corp. Returns

21-07-2001
Near the main Museum parking lot and adjacent to the site of the Auschwitz I Main Camp, work has resumed on the construction of a commercial/service complex and a parking lot belonging to the Maja corporation.

Yad Vashem Visits the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum

20-07-2001
The latest in a series of seminars organized by the Museum for educators from the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute in Israel has begun. Group exchanges between the two institutions have been underway for several years.

Museum staff take part in the solemn ceremonies in Jedwabne. The New Memorial in Jedwabne

20-07-2001
Museum director Jerzy Wróblewski and his deputy, Krystyna Oleksy, took part in the solemn ceremonies commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the murder of the Jews in Jedwabne. During the ceremony, Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized to the Jews for the murder committed there sixty years earlier. - "I apologize in my own name and in the name of all Poles whose conscience is disturbed by that crime," said Kwasniewski. "We know with complete certainty that there were Poles among the persecutors and perpetrators. We cannot have any doubts: here, in Jedwabne, citizens of the Polish Republic died at the hands of other citizens of the Republic. This is what people did to people, and what neighbors did to neighbors."

They watched the buffer zone. UNESCO in Auschwitz and in Oswiecim

15-07-2001
Peter King, chairman of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, made a two-day visit to the Museum. He was accompanied by members of ICOMOS (the International Council of Monuments and Sites - the international non-governmental organization responsible for setting standards in the heritage conservation community) and representatives of the international commission of experts who will advise on solving problems connected with the Museum buffer zone and with establishing a pedestrian connection between the Auschwitz and Birkenau sites.