News
French Foundation for the Remembrance of the Shoah Extends Financial Help to the Museum Yet Again
The French Foundation for the Remembrance of the Shoah (FMS) has assigned 130 thousand euro for landscaping at the so-called Alte Judenrampe, the railroad tracks between the sites of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II camps, where trains full of people sent to Auschwitz by the Nazi Germans arrived from 1942 to 1944.
French President Jacques Chirac unveiled the unique open-air exhibition on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2005. Financial support to the Auschwitz Museum from the FMS and the cooperation of the local authorities made this possible.
Now, the Foundation is supporting work, already underway, on the access roads to the tracks. This cooperative effort between the Museum and the Oświęcim local administration is intended to facilitate bus access to the Judenrampe and reduce the impact of the increased traffic on local residents.
The people in the photograph:
Simone Veil – deported from France to Auschwitz at the age of 17, in 1944, because she was Jewish. Lost her mother in the camp. Former French minister of health and of social affairs. First speaker of the European Parliament, 1979-1982.
Serge Klarsfeld – born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1935. Chairman of the Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France and member of the board of the Foundation for the Remembrance of the Shoah. His father was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz. Writer, historian, and attorney who has appeared in cases involving deportees. Referred to as a "Nazi hunter" and "the French Wiesenthal." He and his wife Beata brought the war criminal Klaus Barbie, head of the Lyon Gestapo, to trial. They played a leading role in the trial of another war criminal, Maurice Papon, an official in Vichy France, the puppet state subservient to the Third Reich which existed from 1940-1944.
