News

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum preservation experts have made a contribution to the observances marking 150 years of schooling in Brzeszcze, Poland—a few kilometers from the Auschwitz site. The professional restoration—in the modern laboratory at the Museum—and publishing of the chronicles of the Brzeszcze school, covering the years 1890-1947, was a highlight of the anniversary.

The American Sacred Grounds Foundation has proposed the erection of a Sanctuary and Holocaust Monument in Oświęcim. It would be a place for meditation, prayer, veneration, and memory, while serving at the same time as a final resting place for Holocaust victims, according to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum spokesman Jarosław Mensfelt.

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.