News
New Museum Acquisitions
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has acquired two new exhibits: paper sacks for cement from one of the sub-camps, and a portable warming kettle for soup.
The portable warming kettle was used for transporting liquids and soup from the camp kitchen to the place where it was distributed. “The producer was the Küppersbusch company, which is still in business today as a manufacturer of kitchen appliances,” said Igor Bartosik, head of the Collections Department. “We already have kettles like this among our holdings. You can also see them in archival photographs taken at the camp when it was in operation.”
The cement sacks acquired for the Museum collection have labels from the time of the Second World War. They come from the Auschwitz III-Golleschau sub-camp, where prisoners performed slave labor in the quarries and cement factory.
One of the drawings used to “decorate” the walls of prisoner sleeping quarters (used today as part of a cement factory) at the Golleschau site depicts prisoners at work. Among other things, it shows the warehouse, with prisoners stacking hundreds of similar sacks full of cement. The drawing is the work of Jean Bartichand, a Jew from France who was deported to Auschwitz from the Drancy transit camp.
There is now a memorial chamber at the Golleschau site, established by the local community, which includes an exhibition room and a lecture room. Plans are also afoot to create a commemorative trail around the stone quarry there, which is currently flooded.
