News

The European pack for visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum is a lengthy English-language resource targeting teachers and advisors planning visits to the Auschwitz Memorial. It is the result of several years of work by specialists from the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Council of Europe, and the Polish Ministry of National Education.

In the first of 2011 issues of this monthly, we summarize attendance at the Auschwitz Memorial. In the past year, the grounds of the former Nazi German Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz were visited by 1.38 million people. In the 60-year history of the Museum, this is a record number.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands has decided to support the Perpetual Fund of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. The Netherlands joined other European countries which participate in the project. The goal of the Foundation is to preserve the Auschwitz Memorial for the next generations. The income from the Perpetual Fund will serve to finance the conservation of the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp.

Personal mementos, documents, and works of art connected with the history of the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz donated to the Museum by former prisoners and their relatives can be seen at the Let's Build Remembrance exhibition in block 12 at the former Auschwitz I camp. All the donations were made to to the Memorial in the course of the last three years

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has published The Auschwitz Poems: An Anthology in English. This is a large volume of 400 poems by 250 poets from around the world. Some were Auschwitz prisoners like Primo Levi, Halina Birenbaum, Charlotte Delbo, Friedrich Löwy and Tadeusz Borowskiego, and others are modern poets including the Nobel-Prize winners Elie Wiesel, Salvatore Quasimodo, Roald Hoffmann, Wisława Szymborska, and Czesław Miłosz.

Polish President Bronisław Komorowski decorated Oświęcim area residents who aided inmates of the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz during the war. Seventeen of the thirty-two honorees attended the ceremony held at Belweder Palace in Warsaw on February 1 in connection with the sixty-sixth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.