News

The fourth session of the International Auschwitz Council was held in Oświęcim from September 10-11, 2001.

A conference was organized from September 2-8 by the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and Political Education Center in Lower Saxony, Germany, the International Youth Meeting House, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.

Fifty-two graduates received certificates on completion of the "Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust" post-graduate course, which is organized by the Museum and the KEN Pedagogical Academy in Cracow. Academy rector Michał Śliwa handed out the certificates in the presence of the course director, Prof. Wacław Długoborski, and Museum vice-director Krystyna Oleksy.

The governor of Małopolska Province ordered the War Victims Association of Bielsko-Biała to vacate the Gravel Pit. The order, with a clause calling for immediate execution, was issued on the basis of the May 7, 1999 Polish law on the protection of the sites of Nazi death camps. The War Victims Association leased the Gravel Pit from the Discalced Carmelite Sisters Convent in Oświęcim on June 8, 1993.

Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, the archbishop of Cracow, celebrated mass outside the Death Block on August 14, 2001, the sixtieth anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe. After the mass, wreaths were laid in the death cell, at the foot of the Death Wall, and outside the block at the place where a penal roll call was held in reprisal for the escape of one of the prisoners. During this roll call, a group of prisoners, including Father Kolbe, was sentenced to death by starvation.

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.