IAC Newsletter No. 1,
April 10th, 2010

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends,

We are launching this newsletter in an effort to keep the member organisations of the International Auschwitz Committee informed about the IAC’s activities at regular intervals.

But first let me say how very impressed President Noach Flug and all of the members of the Presidium are by the many different activities for which you, our members, are responsible.
In this respect the educational activities are of particular importance, especially when they focus on visits to the Auschwitz Memorial. Just a few months ago our colleague in Luxemburg, Marc Schoentgen, spent several days at the Memorial and the Auschwitz International Youth Meeting Centre together with more than one hundred school students and Belgian survivors of the camp. As a result of this journey he was able to present many moving statements by the students expressing the impressions they gained at the Memorial and during their talks with the survivors. The IAC now plans to use these statements in a future exhibition.

Uwe Hartwig from Frankfurt am Main, the new chairman of the Lagergemeinschaft Auschwitz (Auschwitz Concentration Camp Association) founded by the Austrian survivor Hermann Reineck, carried on his predecessor’s tradition by spending several days at the Memorial on a study visit together with a group of multipliers. The Lagergemeinschaft works closely together with groups of survivors in Krakow and southern Poland and has been able to help the survivors with numerous difficult organisational and health problems. The Lagergemeinschaft also participated in proposing the Polish Vice-President of the IAC, Kazimierz Albin, who received a high decoration of recognition from Germany‘s Federal President.

Each year Raphaël Esrail, General Secretary of the Union des Déportés d’ Auschwitz and French Vice-President of the IAC and Henri Goldberg, General Secretary of the Fondation and Belgian Vice-President of the IAC, also take groups of teachers on visits to the Memorial, where they personally accompany them together with other survivors. In this way, an educational tradition has developed over the years in France and Belgium. This underscores the high level of importance given in the life of the respective schools to the educational and political debate on the Holocaust, its causes and consequences.

And in this context, dear friends, I would like to draw your attention to the conclusion of the ‘Memoire Demain’ project which was initiated above all by Raphaël Esrail. Our French colleagues pursued this project for many years with enormous zeal and determination. The result is now complete in French and English versions, with a German version soon to follow. ‘Memoire Demain’ contains video recordings on DVD of accounts given by survivors at the authentic scene of the crimes in Auschwitz as well as visually reconstructed models of the camp’s real extermination scenarios. School pupils and students, and indeed everyone who is interested, can trace the lives of individual prisoners or follow up particular topics, such as ‘Hunger in Auschwitz’ in preparation for a visit to the Memorial, or to gain more in-depth knowledge following a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This DVD is of immeasurable value, especially as a ‘legacy of the witnesses of the times’.

We are also pleased to be able to tell you that now January 27 is internationally observed as the Day of the Liberation of Auschwitz and as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day designated by the United Nations.
In this respect we have received news from Slovenia, where survivors come together each year with high-ranking state representatives for a remembrance ceremony in Ljubljana. In the Czech Republic the Senate hosts this day in the Wallenstein Palace in Prague together with organisations representing the victims of persecution. For two years now, school classes and young people have been invited to this impressive ceremony, where the Czech Vice-President of the IAC , Professor Felix Kolmer, gave a key speech this year. This year’s remembrance ceremony at Paris Town Hall was equally impressive. Here guests gathered at the invitation of the French capital’s Mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, for the ceremony which was prepared by Raphaël Esrail. The speakers included Simone Veil, the French and Jewish survivors who were recently appointed members of the Academie Francaise and the minister, Hubert Falco.

In Berlin the German Bundestag invites guests to an annual remembrance ceremony on January 27 which includes survivors and people persecuted during the Holocaust as guest speakers. This year’s speaker in the Bundestag was the Polish historian and former director of the Jewish Historical Research Institute in Warsaw, Professor Feliks Tych.
In Germany the 65th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz coincided with a state visit by the Israeli President Shimon Peres, who also addressed the Bundestag on January 27. President Peres had requested Noach Flug, the President of the IAC, to accompany him on this state visit together with a group of Holocaust survivors from Israel.
During his stay in Berlin Noach Flug also met Chancellor Merkel, together with other survivors and a number of Volkswagen trainees. The Federal Chancellor thanked all survivors for the many years they have already dedicated to talking with young people as witnesses of the times. She also thanked the young German and Polish Volkswagen trainees who had carried out important preservation work during their two-week visit to the Auschwitz Memorial: together with the International Auschwitz Committee, Volkswagen carries out this two-week project four times every year and has been doing so for twenty years now. Meanwhile, a tradition has developed at Volkswagen and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, and it is also being continued by young managers and master craftsmen from Volkswagen who attend four-day seminars in Oswiecim/Auschwitz.

Dear friends, on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz the International Auschwitz Committee made a special gesture to raise public awareness. You have all no doubt followed the news about the shocking theft of the sign from the Auschwitz entrance gate “Arbeit macht frei” at the end of last year. Clues to the theft have been traced to Great Britain, Sweden and Poland. The instigators most likely come from a right-wing extremist background. We are all pleased that the Polish police managed to arrest the culprits very quickly, and that some have already stood trial. This theft brought the world-famous gate inscription to the attention of the international public once more. And we are equally certain that many of you already know that the prisoners, who were commanded by the SS to weld the sign together at the locksmiths workshop in the camp, deliberately fixed the ‘B’ upside down in the word ‘Arbeit’: as a sign of self-assertion and contempt for the SS. The Polish survivor, Tadeusz Szymanski, who died in 2002 aged 84, provided accounts of this deed in his many talks. Against this background the IAC has now developed an idea for the 65th anniversary. Based on a suggestion by Michèle Déodat, a French friend of the IAC’s work, we have taken the famous ‘B’ to create the ‘Gift of Remembrance’, a gift with which human beings alone are endowed. You will find a picture of this small statue in our newsletter. The President of the IAC, Noach Flug presented the very first ‘Gift of Remembrance’ to Chancellor Angela Merkel during their meeting on January 26, which has already been mentioned above. The second statuette was presented by him and Christoph Heubner to Shimon Peres on the evening of January 27 in Berlin. This statue, the ‘Gift of Remembrance’ and the symbolic ‘B’, will accompany the work of the IAC on its continuing path: To B remembered!

To mark the 65th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz the IAC mounted an exhibition in Berlin, again in time-honoured cooperation with the German Resistance Memorial Center The new exhibition, entitled ‘The memories live on…’, was opened on January 21 by the Polish-Jewish survivor Marian Turski and will be showing in Berlin until July.

A young German visitor to the exhibition wrote in the guest book:

‘This exhibition did more than simply move me. It has captured me, and it will leave me with a lasting impression. Some posters, some drawings and some texts. Two rooms. This is sufficient to capture me and put my self-control to a very tough test. Especially the drawings. The blood, painted red on one of the last pictures in the shape of a heart. We must make sure we keep our own hearts, and we must never let our empathy die. This I promise, as a ‘successor’ to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.’

A few days ago during a visit to the exhibition, Roman Kent, the President of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and American Vice-President of the IAC, suggested showing it in January 2011 at the United Nations in New York. We will work on his proposal.

The preparations for the 65th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz actually began for the IAC presidium at an international symposium in Moscow in October 2009. This symposium was organised by our Russian Vice-Preseident, Professor Yefim Gologorskiy, with the support of the Moscow city authorities. This important event created the opportunity to once again stress the great hopes the prisoners in Auschwitz pinned on the Red Army as their only possible liberator, and point to the sufferings also endured by Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

Dear friends, I would like to conclude with some important information about the situation at the Memorial. On the initiative of Professor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, the Polish survivor of Auschwitz and present Chairman of the International Auschwitz Council, which is called on by the Polish government for consultations on all questions concerning the Auschwitz Memorial, and Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Memorial, a foundation was established to gain financial support from governments around the globe for the crucially needed preservation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. The continuous restoration and preservation of the Memorial could then be financed by the interest from the foundation capital. President Noach Flug is a board member of the newly established foundation. In the above-mentioned talk with Chancellor Merkel on January 26 in Berlin, the chancellor confirmed to Noach Flug and Christoph Heubner that the Federal Government will contribute 60 million euros towards this fund. Other European governments have also made positive pledges. Needless to say, these assurances have boosted the confidence both of ourselves and the whole management of the Memorial. In addition to this, an international expert commission is currently working on the concept for a new central exhibition at the Memorial. The IAC considers it extremely important that survivors are involved in this project: Noach Flug and Marian Turski are members of this commission. As executive Vice-President of the IAC, Christoph Heubner is also involved in this work.

Another aspect of central importance is the further development of the Memorial’s own ‘Institute for Education’ which is headed by the Deputy Director for Education, Krystyna Oleksy. In the long run, the former ‘Theatre Building’ is to be converted for this purpose, and together the IAC and the Memorial are seeking financial sponsors for this project.
Many of the national exhibitions at Auschwitz Main Camp have been redesigned over the past years. At the moment members of our Austrian organisation are involved in discussions in their country concerning the concept for a new Austrian exhibition at the Memorial. And at the suggestion of Greek survivors and members of the second generation, preparations are also under way for a Greek exhibition.

Dear friends, there are so very many more things that could be included in this first newsletter: for instance, the results of the Prague Conference which led to the Terezin Declaration and the founding of the ‘Terezin Institute’, or the involvement of the IAC in the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. But we will tell you more about these in our next newsletter. In the meantime, you can also find often more detailed information on the IAC Internet site at: www.auschwitz.info
We offer you a warm welcome to visit us there.

And last but not least, I’m happy to tell you that that we will be inviting participants to an executive meeting in Berlin this autumn. At the end of May we’ll be giving you more details about the proposed dates.

We’re looking forward to receiving all your news and information – by letter, by email or by telephone.

From me, and in the name of the Presidium and all of its members, many thanks for your interest and best wishes from Berlin.

Yours sincerely,
Christoph Heubner

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