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Conclusion of the Second Post-Graduate Course. Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust

A ceremony marking the conclusion of the second post-graduate course on Totalitarianism, Nazism and the Holocaust was held in the conference room of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum administration building on July 7. University officials, lecturers, course administrators, and Museum research staff joined this year's course graduates in attendance. Prof. Jacek Chrobaczynski had a lecture to mark the end of the course.

These studies will continue in the coming academic year. The program offers a thorough grounding in the history of Nazism and the German concentration camps, the persecution of the Jewish population of the Third Reich, the history of Polish Jewry, and Polish-Jewish relations. There are also sociology lectures on the mechanisms that produce, shape, and reinforce sterotypes and prejudices, and on the issue of dialogue between Judaism and Christianity.

The lecturers who have agreed to teach in the program include prominent researchers from such Polish universities and other institutions as the Jagiellonian, Silesian, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, and Warsaw Universities, the Pedagogical Academy in Cracow, and the Embassy of Israel in Poland.

The course has attracted great interest among the teachers for whom it is intended. The organizers, the Auschwitz State Museum and the Pedagogical Academy in Cracow, had to turn away some applicants.

This year, more than forty teachers of humanistic subjects from all over Poland (Torun, Zamosc, Tomaszow Lubelski, Gliwice, Wadowice and Oswiecim) took part.