Auschwitz shed returned to Poland

1979 file photo: The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was the principal Nazi killing site in occupied Poland.

1979 file photo: The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was the principal Nazi killing site in occupied Poland.

Published Dec 31, 2013

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Warsaw - An accommodation shed from the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz has arrived back in Poland after a 20-year loan to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum said.

The wooden shed, sometimes referred to as a barrack, and its crude bunks which once held crowded sleeping prisoners had arrived at the port of Gdynia by ship, he said.

It will be re-erected on its original site at Birkenau, part of the Auschwitz complex. Months of negotiations preceded the return, with the Washington museum seeking an extension of the long-term loan, which had been a centrepiece of the exhibition since the museum's opening in 1993.

The shed was part of a so-called family camp for prisoners transferred to occupied Poland from the Nazis' Theresienstadt concentration camp at a site now in the Czech Republic.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was the principal Nazi killing site in occupied Poland. At least 1.3 million people, mainly Jews, were killed before the camps were liberated. - Sapa-dpa

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