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Work Continues on Preserving the Auschwitz Heritage

Preservation internships were held in the specialist preservation workshops of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum from June to September of this year. Students of the Preservation, Conservation, and Restoration of Art Works from Cracow, Warsaw, and Toruń took part.

Students of the Preservation Department at the Mikołaj Kopernik University in Toruń, Poland, compiled a sketch measurement inventory of an original wooden camp utility building, which will be used as the basis for subsequent collection and preservation work.

Students from the Paper and Leather Preservation Department in Toruń undertook the conservation of several paper items. These included original sheets of paper with musical notation from the time when the camp was in operation, archival materials from the Hygiene Institute dated 1943, and three theater posters from 1953. A range of various preservation procedures, appropriate to the condition of the items, was applied.

Students of the art works conservation and restoration departments of the fine arts academies in Cracow and Warsaw began preservation procedures on color compositions in a brick barracks in Birkenau. An initial examination made it possible to schedule preservation work to be carried out in the coming years. All of the work carried out so far is included in the Museum preservation workshop’s plans for mural paintings and mural color compositions at the Auschwitrz-Birkenau site. Additionally, a variety of minor preservation tasks connected with painting and metal were carried out.

Preservation work was also carried out successfully from July to August this year on the shoes from the exhibition in Block no. 5. Assistance by students from the Construction School Complex Number Five in Oświęcim made it possible to apply preservation procedures to over 40,000 shoes.

In September, Professor Heritage and 15 preservation students from Cologne visited the workshop in August. They carried out a range of preservation procedures was on items from the Museum Collections Department, and took part in the preparation of plans for the mural paintings.