Holocaust survivors want Poland to arrange more school trips to Auschwitz
The International Auschwitz Committee (IAC), which brings together Holocaust survivors worldwide, has called on the Polish government to financially support excursions by schoolchildren to the memorial at the former Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reports that the number of Polish visitors to Auschwitz has sharply fallen in recent years.
DPA reports that those who survived imprisonment at Auschwitz are disturbed by the decline in visits to the memorial by Polish schools. In a letter addressed to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the IAC criticizes the fact that Poland is one of only a very few countries in Europe that does not support school trips to such memorial sites and calls on Poland to start such a program.
According to IAC data, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was visited last year by 1.3 million people, 336 000 of whom were Polish. Two years before that the number of Polish visitors was 610 000.
During the Second World War, the complex on the territory of occupied Poland was the Nazis' biggest extermination camp. At least 1.1 million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered there.
Related articles:
- Czech Constitutional Court rejects complaint from man responsible for desecrating memorial to the Holocaust and its Romani victims at Lety
- German Police criticized for their members doing pushups on parts of a Holocaust memorial
- Czech activists plant memorial lindens and oaks at places of importance in the life of Romani partisan Josef Serinek
- Gunter Demnig marked the Nazi deportation route of thousands of Roma and Sinti from Cologne, Germany, then invented the Stolpersteine
- Netherlands unveils memorial to Holocaust victims with names of 102 000 Jews, Roma and Sinti murdered by the Nazis
- Slovak Government apologizes for anti-Jewish measures during WWII
- Grandson of famous Czechoslovak partisan from the Romani community says his grandfather was a hero
- 2 August marks 77 years since the tragic mass murder of 4 200 Romani people at Auschwitz
- Director of Jewish Museum in Prague responds to commentary by František Kostlán, says its remarks about him are "gossip"
- Even in hell, she chose good: Alfreda Markowska, the Polish Romani woman who saved Jewish and Romani children from the Nazis
- Czech clergyman proposes the readers themselves choose the names of Holocaust victims to be read on Yom Hashoah this year, whether Jewish or Romani
- Exhibition in Czech capital shows newly-identified photographs of the deportations of Jewish people from Prague during the Holocaust
facebook
twitter
google
