News

On Sunday, January 27, 2013, a ceremony will be held for the 68th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. Honorary patronage over the event will be assumed by the President of the Republic of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski.

Guardian of National Memory Sites gold and silver medals were presented to employees of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The solemn ceremony was presided over by Professor Andrzej Kunert, secretary of the Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom (ROPWiM)

In the Auschwitz Memorial Site, celebrations were held for the 70th anniversary of the death of Archimandrite Grigol Peradze, an Orthodox holy martyr, who was murdered in the German Nazi concentration camp on Dec. 6, 1942.

The conference “Digital data archiving of victims of Nazism,” organised by the Auschwitz Museum, was attended by representatives of 26 institutions from seven countries in Europe, the USA and Israel, mainly specialist involved in the building of a database consisting of the names and surnames of those persecuted by the Nazis. The theme of the meeting was to discuss the problem of a long-term storage of digital data.

In Paris, a convention was signed under which the French Republic will provide 5 million euro to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation’s Perpetual Fund. The sum will be transferred in five instalments starting from 2012. The agreement was signed by the French Minister of Veterans, Kader Arif, and from the side of the Foundation, its president, Dr Piotr M.A. Cywiński.

Nearly 50 diplomats and representatives of the governments from around the world took part in the Raphael Lemkin Seminar which was organised by the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR) in collaboration with the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust and the United Nations.