Auschwitz Death Camp Memorial Needs Funds

The memorial on the grounds of the old Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp could fall into disrepair due to a lack of funds, and organizers are looking to the international community for help.

The spokeman for the museum on the site, Jaroslaw Mensfelt, told a Polish newspaper that without outside help, Poland could have trouble retaining Auschwitz as a memorial site, the DPA news agency reported.

Budget shortfall

According to the director of the memorial, Piotr Cywinski, some 200 million zloty (62.5 million euros, or $96.5 million) is currently needed for repairs. The budget the museum gets annually from the Polish government is 10 million zloty per year, and another 10 million is earned from the sale of books and fees for tours and parking. Help from abroad is currently a “symbolic” 600,000 zloty, he said.

Cywinski told the newspaper, Dziennik Polski, that the international community, particularly the EU, should share the burden of keeping up the memorial.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of Nazi Germany's concentration camps. Its remains are located in Poland approximately 50 kilometers west of Kraków and 286 kilometers south from Warsaw. The camp took its name from the nearby town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German). Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka, refers to the many birch trees surrounding the complex.

The camp commandant, Rudolf Höß, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that up to 3 million people had died at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised this figure to 1.1 million,[1][2] about 90 percent of whom were Jews from almost every country in Europe.[3] Most victims were killed in Auschwitz II's gas chambers using Zyklon B; other deaths were caused by systematic starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported "medical experiments".

In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. By 1994, some 22 million visitors — 700,000 annually—had passed through the iron gate crowned with the motto "Arbeit macht frei".