News

Several hundred people attended observances marking Roma and Sinti Genocide Remembrance Day on the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The ceremony was held to mark the sixty-seventh anniversary of the liquidation of the so-called “Gypsy Family Camp” (Zigeunerfamilienlager). The Nazis murdered almost three thousand men women and children in the Birkenau gas chambers on the night of August 2/3, 1944.

The Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust has expanded the series “Voices of Memory” by releasing a further volume. It is dedicated to the Roma, who were murdered in Auschwitz.

The Warsaw Uprising broke out 67 years ago, on August 1, 1944. The heroic combat went on for 63 days. On the anniversary of these events, Museum Director Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński, himself a native of Warsaw, joined Oświęcim mayor Janusz Chwierut and his deputy Maria Pędrak in laying a wreath at the Death Wall on the grounds of the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz , paying homage to the heroes and victims of the Uprising including the thousands of residents of the capital deported to Auschwitz.

Being Human in Auschwitz was the subject of this year’s nationwide contest Auschwitz—my land. History and memory years later. Participating in the project were nearly 530 students from 25 schools. In this edition of Oś we publish the winning entries, literary and photographic works.

From July 10th to 21st, 2011, twenty-one educators from Israel participated in a further edition of twelve-day seminar “The Memory of Auschwitz – Its meaning for Jews and Poles. Auschwitz in the Collective Memory of Poland and the World”, that is organized by the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Members of the International Council of Christians and Jews visited the Auschwitz Memorial for the first time in the history of the organization. On July 5, the group of more than a hundred people from 27 countries walked the Remembrance Trail on the grounds of the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau, which was marked by four symbolic stations. The visit to the Memorial was part of the three-day Council meeting, held in Cracow this year under the title Religion and Ideology: Polish Perspectives on the Future.