At a ceremony at Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation passed 289 documents to 18 institutions.
They include the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute and the Czech, Dutch, Lithuanian and Danish embassies.
The Felzmann auction house in Neuss, in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia region, had planned to sell more than 600 original documents in November last year.
They were linked to German Nazi concentration camps, ghettos and other sites of crimes committed by Nazi Germany, and included postcards and letters from victims and their families.
On January 30, the foundation bought 433 of the documents with help from the regional government of North Rhine-Westphalia and outside donors.
Polish Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska said no public money was used.
She added that documents previously sold to a private museum in Haifa were also recovered free of charge through international cooperation.
Among the items is a postcard written on January 20, 1942 by Jan Perkowski, a prisoner in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison, to his mother Maria.
He thanked his parents for the letters, Christmas tree and wafer they had sent, said he was well, and asked how the family was coping with severe weather.
"A few simple sentences. An ordinary son’s concern for his loved ones, written in a reality in which nothing was ordinary," Cienkowska said.
"Not everything that can be sold should be an object of trade," she added, urging anyone holding camp documents, prisoners' letters or other mementoes of victims to give them to museums and archives so historians can study them.
Nathanael Liminski, a North Rhine-Westphalia minister, said: "When memory becomes a commodity, dignity is undermined."
He added that the last Holocaust survivors are dying and that antisemitism is rising, including in Germany.
A draft law to restrict trade in items directly linked to the persecution of Nazi victims has been sent to the German Bundestag, he said.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation's director-general, Wojciech Soczewica, said that buying documents on the private market was a new step for the organisation and an "unconventional operation" that required time and creativity.
(ał/gs)
Source: PAP, auschwitz.org