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Album: "75 Years of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial"
"75 Years of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial" is the title of the album published for the anniversary of the creation of the Museum at the site of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. The English-Polish publication can be downloaded in PDF format.
In his introduction the director of the Museum Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński wrote: "The 75 years of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum constitute, above all, the history of increasing awareness, development, and consolidation of the memory of the victims of Auschwitz. It is a history that has been discovered, researched, explored, disseminated, and retold with the development of documentary research and the emergence of ever-new testimonies, memoirs, and accounts. It is a history that has also repeatedly had to be defended against various distortions, falsifications, revisionism, and denial."
"Lastly, it is a slow but increasingly profound understanding—not only in Europe—that it is impossible to analyse the post-war period comprehensively without recognising the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against the Jews and Roma as well as the numerous crimes against Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and many other innocent people deported to the camp from various parts of occupied Europe, as a turning point in the history of humanity," he wrote.
The album is divided into six chapters: creation of the Museum, Survivors at the Memorial, preservation of authenticity, education and memory, visits, and custodians of the Memorial.
"Seventy-five years is also the story of people, very specific people. Beginning with the survivors who led to the creation of this Memorial and managed it for the first decades, through the later employees of the Museum—predominantly post-war people—up to the present generation of museologists, historians, conservators, educators, archivists, curators, administrators and security staff of this unique place on the world map," wrote Piotr Cywiński.
Photographs illustrating different events from the Museum's 75-year history are accompanied by quotations from letters and entries in the Museum's memory book - mainly by leaders of states and international organisations from all over the world - which speak of the role and significance of this place. The album closes with a calendar of the most important events in the Museum's history.
The publication can be downloaded here.
Files to download
