News

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.

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.

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 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."

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.

The exhibition I Still Have So Much to Do - Jerzy Adam Brandhuber, Oct. 23 1897-June 19, 1981 is on view in the Museum's temporary exhibition room in Block no. 12 on the site of the former Auschwitz I-Main Camp from June 1 through the end of October 2001.