News

Recent days have seen the 65th anniversary of the tragic events that befell the women’s penal company of the Auschwitz German camp in the sub-camp at Budy, outside Oświęcim. One night in early October 1942, German women prisoner functionaries battered 90 French Jewish women to death.

Most of the needed land has now been purchased. The Foundation for the Memory of Shoah, from France, has provided the funding. Construction work can now begin on the roundabout and parking lot intended to improve access for visitors to the Judenrampe, the railroad siding between the sites of the Auschwitz and Birkenau German camps.

Not many of the prisoners of the Nazi German Auschwitz concentration camp lived to see liberation. Local residents helped them, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, in the unequal struggle to survive.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington has given Auschwitz Museum historians access to the 115 photographs in an album belonging to Auschwitz SS man Karl Hoecker. Adjutant to the third Auschwitz commandant, Richard Baer, Hoecker took the pictures in the second half of 1944. An anonymous benefactor recently donated the photographs to the American museum.

The Museum had a visit from the Red Cross International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The delegation included Director Reto Meister, Archive Director Udo Jost, and Beat Schweizer, the deputy director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. After touring the site of the Auschwitz camp, the guests met Museum Director Piotr M.A. Cywiński and Museum Archive Director Piotr Setkiewicz.

A young German conscientious objector performing alternative service at the Auschwitz Museum is the protagonist of a film that opens in movie theatres across Germany today.