News

A temporary exhibition on the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were victims of Nazi persecution from 1933 to 1945 opened in the Visitor Reception Building at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim on September 21, 2004.

The Auschwitz Preservation Society has commemorated British POWs who perished during American air raids on the IG Farben factory where they performed slave labor for the German company. The memorial plaque hangs on the wall of the parish cemetery in Oświęcim.

The Fraternal General Chapter and International Formation Directors Meeting of the Friars Minor Conventual, the Franciscan order, ended its two-week session with mass in front of Block no. 11 at the site of the Nazi Auschwitz camp. The Minister General, Friar Joachim Giermek, a Polish American, said mass for nearly 200 friars from 39 countries. Giermek is the first of the 118 Ministers General of the Franciscans over the course of their 800-year history to have Polish roots.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim marked the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto by publishing (in Polish) Andrzej Strzelecki’s Deportacja Żydów z getta łódzkiego do KL Auschwitz i ich zagłada. Opracowanie i wybór źródeł [The Deportation of the Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and their Extermination: A Study and a Selection of Sources]. The book is over 300 pages long....

Transports of Poles from Warsaw to Auschwitz Concentration Camp after the outbreak of the Uprising.

The Polish embassy in Ottawa has asked the Canadian government to counteract the slandering of Poland by the Canadian media. On April 30, the national news on CTV television carried a story on John Demaniuk’s being stripped of his US citizenship. The reporter referred to “the Polish camp in Treblinka.” As a result, the Polish embassy lodged a protest with CTV. On the part of the network, Robert Hurst replied that he did not regard the term as inappropriate and that it was used in a geographical sense, as it is used throughout North America.