The IPN President Karol Nawrocki, Ph.D. issued a congratulatory letter to Elżbieta Dziedzic, the Council President, and all the participants of the event.
The ceremonial gala during which the laureates of this year’s "Custodian of National Memory" Prize will receive their awards from the President of the Institute of National Remembrance, Karol Nawrocki Ph.D., is going to be held at the Royal Castle in Warsaw at 12:00. The event will be broadcast live on IPNtv.
The search for and identification of the victims of the crimes of two regimes, German Nazism and Soviet communism, has been one of the cornerstones of the Institute of National Remembrance's work for many years. This is the sector of our activity that has never changed," said IPN President Karol Nawrocki at the press conference on the eighth stage of works at the former Mokotow prison on Rakowiecka Street in Warsaw.
On 14 June 1940, German concentration camp Auschwitz received 728 Poles, its first - save for thirty German criminals who had been brought here to take the positions of kapos - inmates. Initially a detention and elimination facility targeting almost exclusively the Third Reich's enemies from Poland, in time it expanded the scope of its operation, adding extermination of Jews from all over Europe, slave labour benefitting the German industry, large-scale robbery of deportees, and many others.
To this day, the Germans and Austrians are not certain how to deal with the grim legacy of concentration camps. The trivialisation of memory adds to the lack of knowledge about the camps among the younger generations.
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