News
Roundabout and parking spaces - Better access for visitors to former camp
Most of the needed land has now been purchased. The Foundation for the Memory of Shoah, from France, has provided the funding. Construction work can now begin on the roundabout and parking lot intended to improve access for visitors to the Judenrampe, the railroad siding between the sites of the Auschwitz and Birkenau German camps.
Work will probably get underway next spring. The French foundation has provided 500 thousand zloty for the construction of a roundabout and parking spaces for tourists at this location. The land needed for the project has now been purchased. Only one more lot must be purchased, and a decision on that purchase, which involves an inheritance issue, is expected in October. Andrzej Bibrzycki, the township head, says that the local government will begin negotiations over the land as soon as that issue is resolved.
This is not the only project intended to facilitate access for visitors in the vicinity of the Birkenau site. The third stage of the Government Oświęcim Strategic Program also envisions a road that should make life easier for the residents of Brzezinka.
The Altenjudenrampe is the place where trains arrived carrying transports of prisoners and then, later, the victims of Auschwitz. It was made accessible to visitors at the beginning of 2005, with an exhibition including part of the platform and tracks. Two of the train cars used to transport prisoners to Auschwitz stand there.
More than half a million Jews from all over Europe, as well as tens of thousands of Poles, Roma, and people of other ethnic backgrounds arrived at the Altenjudenrampe between the spring of 1942 and mid-May 1944. SS physicians carried out immediate selections of the newly-arrived Jews, sending 70 to 75% of them to extermination in the gas chambers.
In the future, expressway S1, running nearby, will improve access to the camp. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum recently expressed its approval of General Directorate of National Routes and Highways plans for the expressway, notwithstanding earlier fears that the remains of victims might lie along the route.
A special investigation, using archival records and soil samples from cores drilled in eleven places, ruled out any such possibility.
