We offer our readers this album about Auschwitz concentration camp, which contains both archival material when the camp was in operation and contemporary photographs of what has left.

The archival material, in the form of documents and photographs, comes mainly from the collections of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, which assumed responsibility after the war for preserving the evidence of Nazi crimes and commemorating the martyrdom and death of the victims. The archival material illustrates the site of the camp and the buildings there in the years 1940-1945 and, more importantly, depicts the fate of the people deported to Auschwitz-both those who were put to death in the gas chambers immediately after arrival, and those who were sentenced to labor and death in the concentration camp.

The contemporary photographs are the work of Adam Bujak, an artist who has held a place among the leading Polish photographers for years. His photographs reflect the present appearance of the site of the concentration camp within the boundaries of the Museum. They depict what is left of the camp, sometimes in its original state and sometimes in the form of ruins, the witness to and evidence of the crimes of an inhuman totalitarian system. These photographs portray the most important things that distinguish the Museum from other similar institutions around the world: the original site of the greatest crime of the twentieth century, the Holocaust.