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The children of the Holocaust speak out...

An educational session for post-intermediate-school teachers and students on the fate of Jewish children rescued during the Holocaust, their lives after the war, and the attitudes of the Polish public to the Shoah was held on November 28. Organized by the Museum Education Center, the session accompanied a visit to the Museum by Krystyna Budnicka, Anna Drabik, Elżbieta Ficowska, and Joanna Sobolewska-Pyz, members of the Polish Children of the Holocaust Association.

The November meeting had a ceremonial aspect. The guests took part in the session, sharing their recollections and telling about their Association’s work. The program also included words and music prepared by students from the Mechanical-Electrical School Complex in Kęty under the direction of Grażyna Ferenc and Aleksandra Węglarz. A documentary film was shown on the Holocaust and especially the fate of Jewish children both inside and outside the ghetto walls.

This was the year’s fifth one-day thematic conference, supplementing and developing the subjects covered in the postgraduate course and seminars conducted by the Education Center at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim. Previous thematic conferences dealt with the resettlement operation in the Zamość region and the arrival of civilians from there in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the founding of the Gypsy family camp in Birkenau and the situation of the Roma under the Third Reich, the fate of children in Auschwitz, and the work of the artist Marian Kołodziej, a former Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoner.