The former Yugoslav republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia signed a historical agreement, Result of 14 years of negotiations sponsored by UNESCO to renovate one of the pavilions of the former Auschwitz concentration camp.
“Today, fourteen years of diplomatic negotiations are finally bearing fruit. This historic agreement fills a gap, a Lack of memory in the same place where these horrors took place,” Audrey Azoulay, director general of the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), said in a statement.
The pavilion to be renovated at today's Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland is the so-called Block 17 Built in 1941 by the prisoners themselves to accommodate the growing number of prisoners.
Most of the 20,000 deportees from the former Yugoslavia passed through this place, which has been in use since 1963 – when the concentration camp was already converted into a museum It hosted exhibitions.
After the disintegration of In Yugoslavia, the pavilion was closed in the 1990s and remained empty since 2009.
Since 2010, UNESCO has been promoting negotiations between the six former Yugoslav republics Reconstruction of a permanent exhibition together in this place of historical memory.
Fourteen years later, the understanding reached includes both collaborations renovate the pavilion as a creation of this new collective exhibition, It is intended to commemorate the prisoners of Yugoslavian origin who were deported during the Second World War due to the Nazi persecution policy.
The signing ceremony, which took place this Thursday in Paris, was attended by the culture ministers or government representatives of the six participating countries, as well as the Director General of UNESCO, who acts as Director General at the request of the States Depositary of the agreement.
For Azoulay, whose agency is tasked with promoting education about the Holocaust and genocide, that understanding is a Sign of “common commitment”. to learn from the past and heal the wounds of history that transcends borders and generations.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has also been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.