CURRENT
27.01.2016
71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
On January 27, 71 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp by the Red Army, survivors of the National Socialist extermination mania commemorated those murdered together.
The memorial service took place in the so-called sauna building, where the newly arrived prisoners were tattooed.
14.01.2016
Commemorative march on the anniversary of the dissolution of the ghetto in Krakow.
On March 13-14, 1943, the Nazis carried out the operation to dissolve Ghetto B in Krakow. The ghetto had been divided into part A and part B on December 6, 1942.
There was barbed wire between the two camps and it was forbidden to move to the other part. Ghetto A was the living space for working people, ghetto B was intended for non-working people, i.e. the elderly, the sick and children. However, many working people did not want to abandon their family members and moved to part B: a decision that led them to their deaths.
When the Krakow ghetto was dissolved, around 2,000 Jews were murdered in the streets and buried in a mass grave on the camp grounds in Plaszow.
Date:
March 13, 2016
Place:
Start at Bohaterow-Getta Square, followed by a march to the former Plaszow concentration camp.
Website:
www.jewishfestival.pl
04.01.2016
Record number of visitors to the Auschwitz Memorial
The museum administration has announced the visitor figures for 2015.
As a result, more than 1.72 million people visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial last year, more than ever before in a single year.
The number of visitors last year was therefore 190,000 higher than the previous record of 1.53 million from 2014.
German visitors ranked fourth in the statistics after Poles (425,000), Britons (220,000) and Americans (141,000). Accordingly, 93,000 people traveled from Germany, 18,000 more than in 2014.
Source: www.auschwitz.org
22.12.2015
71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Date:
January 27, 2016
Place:
12:30 pm Memorial service in the building of the former “Sauna” in Birkenau14:00 pm Memorial service at the memorial to the victims of the former Auschwitz extermination camp in Auschwitz II-Birkenau
17.12.2015
Over 100.000 World Youth Day participants visit Auschwitz
More than 130,000 participants of the Catholic World Youth Day (WYD) in July in Krakow, Poland, want to visit the former German extermination camp Auschwitz. The final number will only be known once registration for special guided tours for WYD groups has been completed, said a spokesperson for the memorial in Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in southern Poland on Wednesday when asked by the Catholic News Agency (KNA). From July 20 to 28 and August 1 to 3, the memorial will only be open to WYD participants.
Due to the expected large number of visitors, the young Catholics would not be able to visit the inside of the camp blocks, the spokesperson said. Information boards would therefore be set up in front of the blocks especially for the WYD participants. The pilgrims would be shown the most important places in the Auschwitz main camp and the Birkenau extermination camp. In addition, all visitors will receive printed guides in their native language. According to Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, Pope Francis also wants to visit Auschwitz. There has been no Vatican confirmation of this so far. The Pope has invited young Christians from all parts of the world to the World Youth Day in Krakow from July 26 to 31. Its motto is “Blessed are the merciful, for they will find mercy”. Meeting days will be held in all 41 Polish dioceses before and after WYD. The director of the memorial, Piotr Cywinski, hopes that the visit to the museum will be “not only an important history lesson, but also a unique personal experience” for the WYD participants. In Auschwitz, they can learn where hatred, anti-Semitism and contempt for people led a few decades ago.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi extermination camp from 1941 to 1945. During the Second World War, Germans murdered more than 1.1 million people there; most of them were Jews. Almost 40 percent of the registered prisoners were Polish. Auschwitz is located around 60 kilometers west of Krakow. It was annexed by the German Reich at the beginning of the Second World War.
Around 1.53 million people visited the former extermination camp in 2014. The memorial is located on the territory of the diocese of Bielsko-Zywiec. The diocese has therefore taken over the registration of WYD visitor groups. According to Polish media reports, it is prepared for up to 300,000 Auschwitz visitors.
Source: Katholische-SonntagsZeitung.de
27.01.2015
70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
More than a million dead, most of them Jews. This inconceivable number made Auschwitz a symbol of the Holocaust worldwide. When Red Army soldiers liberated the concentration camp on January 27, 1945, they found around 7,000 sick and completely exhausted prisoners, including children. The International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, as it is officially known, was introduced by the United Nations in 2005, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In Germany, the millions of victims of Nazi terror have been commemorated annually on January 27 since 1996.
