News

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.

The Sybille 2003 awards for the Museum events of the year were announced on International Museum Day. Winners received statuettes of Sybilla at the Royal Castle in Warsaw on Tuesday. This year, the jury did not award a Grand Prix.

A Cracow court has ruled that the Maja company of Oświęcim is bankrupt. In early March, the firm had debts of over 12 million zloty. The Maja company gained notoriety when it began erecting commercial buildings near the site of the Nazi death camp.

The latest exhibition in the cycle highlighting wartime and postwar art by Auschwitz prisoners is Painter of the Holocaust: An Exhibition of the Works of Halina Ołomucka from the Collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim. Halina Ołomucka is an outstanding artist of Jewish origin. She was in the Warsaw ghetto before being deported and passing through several concentration camps, including Auschwitz (camp number 48652).

Danuta Czech died on April 4, 2002 at the age of 82. She was the author of numerous scholarly studies of the history of the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp, including the fundamental study The Auschwitz Chronicle. She served for many years as a member of the staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim.

Several thousand young Jews from all over the world were joined by Poles last Monday in the 13th March of the Living, which pays homage to and expresses remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. They walked the Death Road from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp site to the Birkenau Concentration Camp site.