News

Most of this issue of Oś is dedicated to the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Inside, you will find reports of the commemorations, as well as the words of former prisoners and politicians that were said during the ceremony at the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Pauza Foundation for the Development and Promotion of Contemporary Art have published Mikołaj Grynberg’s album Auschwitz: What Am I Doing Here?

The heads of the two institutions have signed a cooperation agreement between the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Mauthausen Memorial. It covers the sharing of more than 300 thousand digital records related to documents held by the archives in the two memorial sites.

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.