The family of a Holocaust survivor has donated his extensive collection of documents related to the Auschwitz death camp and the history of World War II to the archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
The family of Wladyslaw Rath handed over 1,893 documents and 29 photographs, the museum announced Thursday.
Most of the documents deal with the extermination and persecution of Jews in the Third Reich and areas occupied by the Nazis, as well as the fate of those deported to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and those held in ghettos. Some deal with prisoners in forced labor and internment camps.
Rath and his sister Dorota worked at Oskar Schindler’s factory, and both were saved by Schindler. After the war Rath returned to Krakow, and in 1951 he moved to Vienna. He died in 1996.
“We always thought with my husband that this collection should be in the museum,” Ewa Rath, Rath’s widow, said in a statement issued by the museum. “I know that there is a great Yad Vashem Museum in Israel, but I think that this collection should return to the place where my husband’s father lost his life and that is a great symbol of the crime of those times. Auschwitz-Birkenau is something special in the history of war and Nazism, it was a machine to murder people.”
The museum’s director, Piotr Cywinski, said the collection “is the biggest gain for decades in the history of our archive.”