September 17-21, 2014
Krakow, Poland

On September 17-21, 2014 a group of academics and students from our University (Institute of Arts) attended the IV International Congress "Youth Is for the World without Violence" (Krakow, Poland). Nearly 1000 young researchers from Ukraine, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Georgia, Czech, Slovakia, Germany and Poland took active part in it.

During the Congress the youth had an opportunity to talk with those, who had the experience of being in the concentration camp in their childhood. All the participants visited an Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945). Auschwitz-Birkenau was the principal and the most notorious of the six concentration and extermination camps established by Nazi Germany to implement its Final Solution policy which had as its aim the mass murder of the Jewish people in Europe. Built in Poland under Nazi German occupation initially as a concentration camp for Poles and later for Soviet prisoners of war, it soon became a prison for a number of other nationalities. Between the years 1942-1944 it became the main mass extermination camp where Jews were tortured and killed for their so-called racial origins.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of the concentration camp complexes created by the Nazi German regime and was the one which combined extermination with forced labour. At the centre of a huge landscape of human exploitation and suffering, the remains of the two camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, as well as its Protective Zone were placed on the World Heritage List as evidence of this inhumane, cruel and methodical effort to deny human dignity to groups considered inferior, leading to their systematic murder. The camps are a vivid testimony to the murderous nature of the anti-Semitic and racist Nazi policy that brought about the annihilation of more than 1.2 million people in the crematoria, 90% of whom were Jews. http://whc.unesco.org/ 

To honor those who were tortured to death, the participants of the Congress took part in the Marsh of Memory.