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The Seventh Session of the International Auschwitz Council
During the next session of the International Auschwitz Council will be held in Warsaw on November 3-4, 2003, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum administration will present preliminary plans for the “international Center for Teaching Auschwitz and the Holocaust,” which will be created within the Museum as a further development of the educational activity of the various Museum departments, including the Education Center.
The project envisions that, once legal questions have been settled, the International Center will have its headquarters in the “Old Theatre” building, directly adjacent to the grounds of the Museum.
On the second day of the session, the Council will be presented with reports from directors of museums and martyrdom mausoleums on the work of the institutions they administer, and will discuss coordinating the work of these institutions.
The International Council of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was created under a decision of the Polish minister of Culture and Art. in 1990. Public figures and authorities on the history of the Second World War, concentration camps, and the Holocaust were invited to join. The Council is consultative in nature, seeks to shape opinion, and supports the Museum in its work.
In 2000, the Polish prime minister dissolved the International Council of the Museum and created the Auschwitz Council, which assumed the responsibilities of the previous council but, unlike its predecessor, is an opinion forming and consultative organ of the Polish president of the council of ministers for the protection and utilization not only of the site of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, but also of other Monuments of Destruction. Its current president is Professor Władysław Bartoszewski.
The Old Theatre Building – a camp storage building during the war, it was used from 1984-1993 as a convent by the Discalced Carmelite Sisters. Hundreds of prisoners were murdered in the gravel pit adjacent to this building during the period when the camp was in operation. After the war, the gravel pit first came to public attention in the 1980s during the controversy over the Carmelite convent. In the 1990s, Kaizmierz Świtoń initiated the placing of several hundred crosses there; Świtoń and the crosses were removed in 2000, after the new law on the protection of Memorials came into force.
