News
International Tracing Service Visits Museum
The Museum had a visit from the Red Cross International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The delegation included Director Reto Meister, Archive Director Udo Jost, and Beat Schweizer, the deputy director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. After touring the site of the Auschwitz camp, the guests met Museum Director Piotr M.A. Cywiński and Museum Archive Director Piotr Setkiewicz.
The discussions looked back over many years of cooperation and emphasized that the two institutions had worked productively together, exchanging information and copies of documents illustrating the history of Auschwitz. The talks went on to cover ways of intensifying the mutual contacts in the future. Director Cywiński outlined the Museum’s research plans for the coming years, while Director Meister shared the experience of the Tracing Service in putting its resources into digital form and creating advanced databases.
Founded in 1943 as the Central Tracing Service, the institution has functioned in its present form, as an agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross with headquarters in the central German town of Bar Arolsen, since 1954. Its archives hold records on prisoners in all sorts of Nazi camps (and, above all, concentration camps) and slave laborers deported to Germany during the Second World War.
