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The 27th of January 2012 is the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. This year, we are also commemorating the 70th anniversary of commencement of the mass extermination of Jews in the Birkenau gas chambers. During this year’s anniversary ceremony, a unique relic was presented: the only preserved door to a gas chamber, deriving from one of the crematoriums, blown up by SS members at the end of the final evacuation of the camp.

“To postwar Europe, Auschwitz became a permanent reference point that fully justifies the entire postwar effort at creating a different Europe that is new, more human, and sensitive. Today, when there is so much talk about the crisis of Europe, it is worth remembering this.” These are the words that we can read in the report of the Auschwitz Memorial for the year 2011. 72 pages of a colourful Polish-English publication present information about the most important events of 2011. DOWNLOAD PDF...

The 22nd meeting of the International Auschwitz Council was held at the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland. The session was attended by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the Deputy Minister of Culture and National Heritage Małgorzata Omilanowska and was presided over by Professor Władysław Bartoszewski. This was the last meeting of the second term IAC.

Meeting witnesses to history, former prisoners of Auschwitz, are of course for obvious reasons popular events, as can be seen on the cover of Oś. The guests of the November Educational Session of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, which drew around 300 participants, teachers and their students, were: Zofia Posmysz, Prof. Wacław Długoborski, as well as Juliusz Zon. In this edition, we publish excerpts of their reminiscences.

The Sketchbook from Auschwitz, a unique work preserved in the collections of the Auschwitz Memorial has been published by the Museum in its entirety for the first time. It is the only set of drawings made in the camp depicting the extermination of Jews deported by German Nazis to Auschwitz. The unknown author documented in his drawings also murdering of prisoners who were sick or had been worked to exhaustion.

In 2011, there were 1,405,000 visitors to the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz. This is a record figure in the more than sixty years of the Memorial, which in 2012 will have been functioning for 65 years. What is important, the number of young people who visited the Site grew significantly – in 2011 they were more than a million, that is more than 150,000 than the year before.