News

Preserving for the Future

An international conference on Preserving for the Future was held from June 23-25 to mark the dedication of the preservation workshops and studios at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

The conference featured a review of preservation work at the Museum financed with international funds raised by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the start of this funding. Many countries and organizations have answered the Lauder Founsdation's call to support the Museum in commemorating the victims of Nazi. As a result, the Museum is no longer isolated and counts on the involvement of the international community. The largest amount of funding has come from Germany—the Federal government and the governments of the länder, or German states.

Specialists from Poland and other countries addressed the conference on both completed and future projects. All agreed on the need to preserve the site of Auschwitz for future generations. Professor Michael Berenbaum expressed this idea most distinctly, stressing the need to preserve the memory of Auschwitz, and the material evidence of the crimes.

The conference also emphasized the need for prompt action to preserve the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria ta the Birkenau site, and to restore and extend legal safeguards to sites connected with the history of the camp but located outside the confines of the Museum, especially the railroad siding and unloading platform known as the Judenrampe, where deportees arrived from 1942 to 1944.