News

The second seminar organized by the Raphael Lemkin Center for Genocide Prevention and the International Center for Education About Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has come to an end.

Austria has joined the countries declaring financial support for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, with a contribution of €6 million. The purpose of the Foundation, called into being last year by Professor Władysław Bartoszewski, is to set up a Perpetual Fund to generate income that will be assigned to the long-term conservation program at the Auschwitz Memorial.

Each year, the Museum Digital Repository adds new records and documents to its holdings. At present, they consist of about 650 thousand personal records based on 70 document sets from the time when the camp was in operation. The names of many persons are repeated because they are entered differently in particular archival sets. Thus, in November 2009, the Museum Digital Repository contained 237 thousand discrete records with first and last names and birth dates. In other cases, the names or birth dates are missing, or the records are simply illegible.

Kadra dowódcza SZP-ZWZ-AK w Konzentrationslager Auschwitz 1940-1945 [Command cadre of the SZP-ZWZ-AK in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, 1940-1945], by Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum historian Dr. Jerzy Dębski, has been published jointly by the Institute of National Remembrance in Katowice and the Museum. It is available in the online bookshop at the Museum website.

Participants in the Plenary Assembly of the European Conferences of Major Superiors, associated in the Union of the European Conferences of Major Superiors, visited the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum on February 9, 2010.

The newest publication from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is a Polish version of Błogosławiona bądź wyobraźnio - przeklęta bądź. Wspomnienia 'Stamtąd' (Imagination: Blessed Be, Cursed Be: Reminscences from There) by former Auschwitz prisoner Batsheva Dagan, who was born in Łódź. In the introduction to this collection of poems, Batsheva Dagan writes that surviving Auschwitz is hard to describe in prose. She wanted to convey her experiences to her readers, and felt that this would be easier through poetry. She wrote the poems after the Holocaust, at moments when the memories overwhelmed her....