News

In July, the Auschwitz Museum Education Center began its now-traditional two-week seminar on “Auschwitz in the Collective Awareness in Poland and Abroad.” Participants include staff from Holocaust remembrance institutions in Israel: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Ghetto Fighters Museum from the kibbutz of the same name, and Massuah (The Lighthouse) from Tel Itzhak kibbutz.

Museum Chief Preservation Officer Witold Smrek announced plans for the imminent start of work to secure the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria II and III at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration Camp.

Archaeologists discovered candlesticks and chandeliers, probably bronze, on Monday at the site of the Great Synagogue of Oświęcim, which was demolished in 1939. The items, buried 65 years ago, were part of the furnishings of the synagogue.

Ceremonies in Oświęcim mark the 64th anniversary of the deportation to Auschwitz of the first transport of Polish political prisoners.

Christoph Heubner, Deputy Chairman of the International Auschwitz Committee in Berlin, and Richard Prasquier, chairman of the French Yad Vashem Committee, have been named by Polish Prime Minister Marek Belka to the International Auschwitz Council, the body that advises the Polish government on mater connected to the Auschwitz-Birkenau site, it was announced on Wednesday.

At the St. Maksymilian Center in the town of Harmęże near Oświęcim on May 28, Bishop Adam Śmigielski of Sosnowiec, Poland, unveiled six plaques commemorating 149 Roman Catholic priests and male religious exterminated by the Nazis in the Auschwitz camp during World War II.