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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.

For one day, it was possible to see the original Nuremberg Laws at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. On September 15, the anniversary of the promulgation of the laws during the 1935 Nazi party congress, an exhibition titled “Racist Madness: The 1935 Nuremberg Laws,” prepared by the Reichsparteitagsgelände documentation center in Nuremberg, opened in the temporary exhibition space in block no. 12. It will be opened until the end of October.

Leaders of the great world religions have prayed for peace and paid homage to the victims of Auschwitz. Participants in the International Encounter of Religions for Peace in Cracow toured the site of the camp. The pilgrims passed in silence through the camp gate with its inscription “Arbeit macht frei.” At the Death Wall, they lit candles and observed a minute of silence. The culmination of the event was a ceremony at the International Monument to the Victims of Fascism in Birkenau.

At the site of the Perm-36 Memorial, the only remaining Gulag site in the Russian Federation, the Pilorama 2009 International Forum was held under the slogan “War and Peace: Man and Imprisonment.” An important part of this year’s meeting was the Russian premiere of the Auschwitz Museum’s new traveling exhibition on the history of the Nazi German concentration camp. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs extended financial support to the project.

Belgium has joined other countries taking part in the mission of preserving the authentic site and buildings of the former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz for future generations. This has been made possible by the creation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation at the beginning of this year.