News

Ehud Barak, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of Israel, visited the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum with Mrs. Barak on October 15.

A new “Remembrance Trail” project carried out by the community of Brzeszcze in cooperation with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and other institutions is dedicated to the remembrance of the prisoners of the Jawischowitz and Buda subcamps of Auschwitz, and the local residents who aided them.

A historic train car has been placed at the ramp (unloading platform) at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site. Beginning in the spring of 1944, Jews deported to Auschwitz by the Germans disembarked and underwent selection by SS doctors there.

The outlook for building a modern center to serve visitors to the Auschwitz Memorial is improving. The Local Government Appeals Board has reversed in its entirety a ruling by Oświęcim President Janusz Marszałek, who had refused to issue construction guidelines for the work at the site of the PKSiS bus garage. Marszałek had suspended the administrative proceeding for one year, citing work on a new municipal zoning ordinance.

The President of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek, visited the site of the Nazi German Auschwitz Concentration Camp together with his predecessor, Hans-Gert Pöttering. Paying tribute to the victims, Buzek said that “everyone who comes here experiences this human tragedy anew. I have been here several times myself, but it does not matter if we come here for the fifth or the tenth time. It is always a profound experience, and we are never unmoved when we leave. This is the great hope—that the millions of people who have visited Auschwitz since the war will remember the place and remember what it warns about.”

The millionth visitor entered the Auschwitz site on September 13. This indicates that attendance for 2009 will be significantly higher than in the previous year, when the millionth visitor did not arrive until October 8. It seems possible that the record of 1,220,000 visitors, set in 2007, will be broken. Auschwitz has the highest attendance figures of any Nazi German camp site and of any Museum in Poland.