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Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks back in Poland Posted by on Jan 4, 2014 in Current News

I have to be honest, I didn’t know that Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks  were on the display at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington…

Half of a historic Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks that was on loan to the U.S. has been returned to Poland after two decades and long negotiations.

Image by Russell McNeil Stoic Meditation on Flickr.com

Image by Russell McNeil Stoic Meditation on Flickr.com

The Nazi barracks was one of the main items at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, which wanted the lease extended. But Poland asked for it back after adopting new regulations in 2003 that limit the loan of all historical and art works to a maximum of five years. That led to years of negotiations between the museums and U.S. and Polish governments that ended in October, when the Holocaust Museum agreed to return its portion of the barracks.

The barracks will undergo conservation and be joined with its other half in Birkenau. The effort to reassemble the barracks at its original location indicates Poland’s determination to be a guardian to the authenticity and integrity of the world’s largest Holocaust memorial.

Barracks No. 30 is the only one left of the wooden barracks that were built before September 1943 at the so-called family camp, where the Germans brought Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto across Poland’s southern border. It housed hospital wards for women and children.

Out of some 46,000 Jews from Theresienstadt, about 20,000 were placed in the family camp and the others were located elsewhere or killed in the gas chambers on arrival.

Did any of you have a chance to visit Holocaust Museum in Washington? And if yes, have you seen the barracks there?

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)

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About the Author: Kasia

My name is Kasia Scontsas. I grew near Lublin, Poland and moved to Warsaw to study International Business. I have passion for languages: any languages! Currently I live in New Hampshire. I enjoy skiing, kayaking, biking and paddle boarding. My husband speaks a little Polish, but our daughters are fluent in it! I wanted to make sure that they can communicate with their Polish relatives in our native language. Teaching them Polish since they were born was the best thing I could have given them! I have been writing about learning Polish language and culture for Transparent Language’s Polish Blog since 2010.


Comments:

  1. Casimir Ziezio:

    No. We visited the German concentration-death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. That was quite enough to burn memory of this atrocity into our brains for life.