Virtual lesson on religious life at Auschwitz death camp now online
An online lesson presenting religious life at the German Nazi death of Auschwitz is now available on the Auschwitz Museum website, the museum's press office announced on Wednesday.
The lesson (available in English at lekcja.auschwitz.org/en_18_duchowienstwo/) is called "Christian Clergy and Religious Life at Auschwitz" and was prepared in connection with World Youth Day. Pope Francis is scheduled to visit the Auschwitz site on Friday.
The inmates of the Auschwitz German Nazi death camp included clergy from Poland, who were imprisoned as part of the Nazi authorities' drive to deprive Polish society of its leaders, and also from other countries occupied by Germany, who were imprisoned for resistance activity or anti-German attitudes, the lesson's author Teresa Wontor-Cichy explains in the introduction to the lesson.
The Auschwitz Museum is an e-learning pioneer among similar institutions in Poland. The first virtual lesson - about the death camp's history - was released in 2012.
The Germans opened Auschwitz in 1940, initially as an incarceration site for Poles. The Birkenau section opened two years later and became the main extermination site for European Jews.
The Nazis killed an estimated 1.1 million people in the camp, mainly Jews, Poles, Roma and Soviet POWs. (PAP)
