News

July marks 64 years since the deportation of the first Soviet POWs to the German Auschwitz camp. Several hundred POWs arrived in the first contingent. A total of more than 15,000 were sent to the camp over the course of World War II. Fewer than 100 of them survived. The Nazis treated the POWs with exceptional barbarity.

A new parking lot is to be opened near the Auschwitz-II Birkenau site. Oświęcim commune wójt Andrzej Bibrzycki said on Wednesday that the zoning laws require that it be built a certain distance from the site. The present parking lot, immediately adjacent to the historical Birkenau main gate, will be removed.

The sixth session in the postgraduate course on Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust, organized by the Museum’s International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, was held from July 3 to 11. .

In July, the International Center for Education on Auschwitz and the Holocaust is organizing the now traditional two-week seminar titled Auschwitz in the Collective Consciousness in Poland and around the World. Israeli teachers, staff from the Yad Vashem Memorial Institute in Jerusalem, and leaders of Israeli groups that visit Poland will attend.

At the behest of the International Auschwitz Council Preservation Commission, the third stage of work to secure the ruins of Gas Chamber II at the Birkenau site has begun in accordance with the plan developed last year.

Over 370 thousand persons visited in groups the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Antoni Stanczyk from the Museum tourists section said Wednesday, stressing that such big number of visitors has not been recorded since the 1970s.