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The main focus of this edition of Oś is a book of fairy tales. The book is extraordinary not for its content, but due to the fact that the stories of the “Adventures of the Black Chick,” “The Fairy Tale about the Hare, Fox, and Rooster,” “The Giant-Egoist,” and the “Wedding in Osy Wielkie” were created behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz.

We are pleased to announce the opening of the First International Summer Academy organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland, as part of educational programs offered by its International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

Several hundred residents of the Oświęcim area have gathered at the grave of the Soviet POWs in Brzezinka to pay tribute to the victims of the air disaster on April 10 that claimed the lives of Polish President Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, and 94 others. They also paid homage to all Poles murdered in the East during the Second World War, in Katyń and elsewhere, and too Soviet soldiers murdered by the Nazi Germans in Auschwitz.

The office of the procurator in Cracow has dropped its investigation into any possible negligence by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum administration. The investigation was opened after the theft of the Arbeit macht frei sign over the gate at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German concentration camp and extermination center.

The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust organized an educational session entitled “Fairy Tales from Auschwitz”. A simple title, but extraordinary history. Prisoners of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp secretly created these fairy tales for their own children. They also made beautiful illustrations for them. There were almost 30 who risked creating them in the shadows of the crematoria chimneys. They started this work when one of them found in the near-by “Canada” warehouses a colorful book of stories that belonged to children who had been murdered in the gas chambers. That is when they decided to write and illustrate fairy tales for their own children.

On 20 March 2010, the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim organized an educational session entitled “Soviet Prisoners of War in Auschwitz”. During the session lectures were presented by: Professor Wacław Długoborski, who spoke about the rights of and crimes against prisoners of war in the Third Reich, as well as by Dr. Jacek Lachendro about the fate of Soviet POWs in Auschwitz. Session participants also visited the Russian exhibition devoted to the liberation of the camp. The exhibition was prepared by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow. The ceremonial opening took place on 27 January 2010.