100,000 to Attend Sunday’s Unveiling of Monument at Auschwitz

The Polish Government said today that about 100,000 persons would attend the unveiling Sunday of a monument to the martyrs of the Auschwitz death camp which will be held at the camp site near Cracow.

Delegates from all parts of the world will come for the ceremony, which will be addressed by Josef Cyrankiewicz, the Polish Premier, who was an inmate at the death camp. The ceremony will be broadcast by Polish radio and television. The Cracow Philharmonic Ensemble will perform, for the first time, a cantata to the Victims of Auschwitz Camp, composed by Christopher Pendereick, the Polish composer.

Among the officials who will attend the unveiling will be State Secretary Mario Szagar of Italy and Dr. Josef Burg, Israeli Social Welfare Minister. Other participants will be Polish State leaders and representatives of political parties, representatives of International Committees of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, former prisoners at Auschwitz and participants from other countries.

The total cost of the monument is 3,500,000 marks, nearly $1,000,000. The inscription on the monument reads: “We must live with the knowledge that Auschwitz existed and we must live with the will that Auschwitz will never be repeated.”

(A spokesman for the committee collecting monument funds said in Frankfurt yesterday that the West German Government had contributed 200,000 marks ($50,000) toward the cost.)

Three days after the unveiling at the Auschwitz camp site, Polish citizens and representatives from other countries will lay wreaths at the Monument of the Fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The anniversary of the revolt is commemorated by Jews and non-Jews annually in many countries. In New York it will be commemorated on April 23, with Senator Jacob K. Javits as principal speaker.