New Books

In last time were published some expected and important publications on the Holocaust. We strongly recommend three of them: monograph of the Belzec extermination camp by Robert Kuwałek, monograph of Sobibor death camp by Marek Bem and unique edition of Sketchbook from Auschwitz.

Robert Kuwałek
Obóz zagłady w Bełżcu
Lublin 2010
280 pages
Language: Polish
Editions: hardcover, paperback

It is the first research monograph on this centre of extermination. The history of the first “Operation Reinhardt” death camp (existing from half-March to the end of December 1942) has been presented on the broad background of extermination of Jews in the General Government. The author analyses all the facets of camp’s functioning, from the stages of the decision process which resulted in creating the camp, through the description of the place itself, profiles of the SS and guarding staff to the liquidation of the camp. He also presents the post-war history of the place, years of devastation, oblivion, semi-commemoration in the 1960s and the construction of the new monument. 
The chapters on the perpetrators were based on the materials from German archives which have not been used in Polish historiography so far. Moreover, the author presents the latest assessments of the number of victims. The appendix contains detailed lists of all the transports coming to the death camp in Bełżec. An insert with photos has been added to the book. One of the photographs which has never been published before shows Chaim Hirszman, one of the three survivors of the camp.


Marek Bem
Sobibór – niemiecki ośrodek zagłady 1942-1943
Włodawa 2011
around 800 pages
Language: Polish

It is the first scientific monograph on the history of the Nazi German death camp at Sobibor. Autor of this book is head of the Sobibor Memorial and one of the experts of the history of Sobibor death camp and Aktion Reinhardt. The monograph is prepared on very large scale and is developed on the basis of unique documents, testimonies, reports, trial files, reports, maps, sketches, plans, videos and photos. Developed in this manner, the synthesis of the history of the Sobibor extermination camp summarizes the current state of knowledge on this subject. This book is also a kind of „catalogue” of Sobibor death camp.


Szkicownik z Auschwitz / The Sketchbook from Auschwitz
Concept: Agnieszka Sieradzka
Publisher: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim 2011
115 pages
Language: Polish / English
Edition: hardback 

The Sketchbook from Auschwitz, preserved in the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is being published in its entirety for the first time. Former prisoner Józef Odi, who was then acting as a watchman on the grounds of the Memorial, found it at the site in 1947.The 22 pages were stuffed inside a bottle concealed in the foundations of one of the barracks of the Birkenau camp, not far from the place where gas chambers and crematoria IV and V were located. Most of the sketches were in pencil; some of them were tinted with ink or colored pencil.To this day, it has proved impossible to determine who made the Sketchbook and signed it “MM.” There can be no doubt, however, as to the artist’s talent and courage. He endangered himself by committing details of camp life to paper; when it became clear that he could not go on drawing, he concealed his work. The fact that the last scene remains unfinished may be a hint that the Sketchbook was hidden in dramatic circumstances. We will never know why the artist failed to complete his last drawing. Might he have been transferred to another camp? Or could he have died tragically in Auschwitz, leaving it for someone else to conceal his work?The Sketchbook from Auschwitz can be regarded as an exceptional work for several reasons. In the first place, it was made in the camp, where artistic depictions of the atrocities were strictly forbidden. The harshest penalties applied for sketching scenes from the lives of the prisoners or the people doomed to extermination. Second, it is the only series of drawings in the Museum collections that portrays the killing of the Jews deported to Auschwitz and the extermination of prisoners from the camp who were sick or who had been worked to exhaustion. Third, this Sketchbook contains the only depiction of the appearance of the so-called Old Jewish Ramp (Alte Judenrampe), the railroad platform where transports of Jews sent to their deaths at Auschwitz arrived from the spring of 1942 to May 1944.


All the texts and informations came from the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Sobibor web-pages.