Polish prosecutors have launched an investigation into a Swedish artist's claims he used the ashes of Holocaust victims in his artwork, an official said Tuesday.

The artist, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, claims he stole ashes from a crematorium at Nazi Germany's Majdanek concentration camp in Poland in 1989 then used them in one of his paintings by mixing them with water.

The number of visitors to the World War II Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp soared to a record 1.43 million in 2012, the museum at the site in southern Poland said Friday.

"This is a record in the 65-year history of this museum. We've received over a million visitors each year over the last six years," it said in a statement published on its website.

Freezing temperatures and heavy snowfall in the Balkans, that seriously affected traffic throughout the region, claimed a second victim on Sunday as a man died from cold in northern Serbia.

The victim was found dead near his home in the village of Ravni Topolovac in northeastern Serbia, emergency services said.

The leaders of Poland and France say they want the new European Union budget to allow for development and further integration despite the need for cuts and austerity measures.

French President Francois Hollande visited Warsaw on Friday and met with his Polish counterpart, Bronislaw Komorowski. They said EU leaders need to make targeted decisions as they discuss the upcoming EU budget, in order to help the 27-nation bloc and its 17-nation eurozone overcome the current debt crisis.

Traces of explosives have been discovered on the wreck of the Polish presidential jet which crashed in Russia in 2010, killing then President Lech Kaczynski and 95 other people, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

"Tests have confirmed the presence of TNT and nitroglycerine on 30 seats. The substances were also found on the area linking the fuselage with the wing," Poland's leading Rzeczpospolita daily said.

Capitalizing on low water levels in Warsaw's Vistula River, police are teaming up with archaeologists to recover gigantic marble and alabaster treasures that apparently were stolen from royals in Poland by Swedish invaders in the mid-17th century.

A police Mi-8 helicopter hovered over a riverbed on Thursday, lifting ornaments such as the centerpiece of a fountain with water outlets decorated with Satyr-like faces.

With exorcism booming in Poland, Roman Catholic priests here have joined forces with a publisher to launch what they claim is the world's first monthly magazine focused exclusively on chasing out the devil.

"The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling," Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.

A Polish Catholic priest accused of pedophilia in Germany and of similar crimes in his home country was found dead Friday, his body badly burned, at the foot of his family grave.

Identified only as Boguslaw P., he had been on trial in Poland for offences allegedly committed in 2004 and 2005 against a child in Pocking in the German state of Bavaria, where he had served as a priest.

Poland has begun digging up a mass grave at Warsaw's military cemetery searching for the remains of victims of a 1948-1956 Stalinist-era campaign of terror, war crimes prosecutors said Thursday.

After more than half a century, the final resting place of key figures in Poland's anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet resistance who perished at the hands of the Stalinist-era secret police is still a mystery.

A collection of photographs of Marilyn Monroe obtained by the Polish state as part of a foreign debt settlement will go on display in Warsaw next month before they are auctioned off later this year.

Poland's State Treasury received the shots of Monroe taken by her friend Milton Green in a collection of nearly 4,000 photographs it received as part of the 1995 financial agreement.