News

1,534,000 people visited the grounds of the former Nazi German Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in 2014. Never before in the space of a single year have so many people familiarized themselves at first hand with the original grounds. This is also the highest attendance in the history of European memorial sites.

Due to the upcoming 70th anniversary of the liberation of the camp and the great interest from the global media the Auschwitz Memorial has prepared, for the convenience of journalists, a set of basic, although not always universally known facts regarding Auschwitz. They are to help prepare information materials and to avoid discrediting slip-ups, such as using the term “Polish death camps”.

Due to an overwhelming interest in visiting the Auschwitz Memorial, a new website has been created: visit.auschwitz.org . It enables convenient booking of the date of a visit from 1 January 2015 onwards. An online reservation is the only guarantee of entering the Museum on the date and time of your choice.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom visited the Auschwitz Memorial on December 10. The visitor was welcomed by the Museum Director, dr Piotr M.A. Cywiński.

25 middle school and secondary school teachers, educators as well as employees of memorial sites and institutions conducting educational activity in the field of history of the Holocaust and World War II participated in the seminar entitled “Judaism — the History and Culture of Polish Jews — the Holocaust” which took place on November 2–13 at the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. On the Polish side, the seminar is co-organized by the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust in the Auschwitz Museum.

The Collections of the Auschwitz Memorial have been enriched with a gift of a painting by David Olère, a former Auschwitz prisoner and member of Sonderkommando. The painting was a part of the private collection of Serge Klarsfeld, vice president of Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Shoah Foundation), member of the International Auschwitz Council and Council of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation.