WARSAW, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- Education and remembrance of the Holocaust and the horrors of World War II (WWII) are universally considered indispensable to prevent new genocides and tragedies, Andrzej Kacorzyk, deputy director of the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, told Xinhua recently.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII, which also meant the end to the worst genocide in human history. Images, documents, witness reports and trials of war criminals have been bit by bit uncovering the scale of the Holocaust, a process that is continuing to this day.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was Nazi Germany's largest concentration and extermination camp. The site, near the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland, now houses a museum and an education center.
"Our mission is to teach about the Holocaust, the tragedy the victims went through, and to facilitate reflection," Kacorzyk, who also works as the director of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, said.
"We document the accounts from victims and survivors, as well as material resources that remain, such as 150 original buildings and 300 ruins, including those of gas chambers and crematoria, and places where the deported passed through..."
Kacorzyk explained educational activities have been expanded over the years to include more recent acts of genocide and mass murder.
"Last year, we invited not only Holocaust researchers and survivors, who are still among us, to our international bi-annual education conference, but also survivors of other genocides... Unfortunately, the mechanisms of genocide have been the same."
The resources available to Kacorzyk's educational activities are enormous and include tens of thousands of reports, ranging from eyewitness accounts to perpetrator accounts in SS (Schutzstaffel, the German Nazi Party's major paramilitary organization) archives.
But while Kacorzyk remains extremely positive about the museum and its educational mission, recent years have brought new challenges for the researchers to overcome. One important resource is becoming increasingly rare: survivors.
"The only survivors still alive are the children," Kacorzyk said, adding that it is a challenge as the survivor stories did not end with the Soviets entering Auschwitz in the last days of January 1945.
Kacorzyk said he has been "privileged to have personally known Kazimierz Piechowski," who escaped from the camp in 1942, and passed away in 2017.
"The main insight I got from talking to him was that he kept escaping for the rest of his life. He remained wary of authority and dreamt every night about the horrors at the camp. One night he even broke his leg after falling out of his bed during one of those nightmares. The survivors show us what the consequences of such events are. For the individual, but also for the community and society as a whole."
The waning number of direct witnesses also makes it harder for educators to face another challenge.
"Next to the two million visitors we had last year -- the highest figure ever -- we have also been able to attract over a million active followers on social media," Kacorzyk said. "However, it is extremely hard to counteract populism, conspiracy theories and outright Holocaust denialism online. It makes education more crucial than it has been at any point in time before."
The COVID-19 pandemic has also hit the activities of Kacorzyk and his team hard, forcing the museum to temporarily close its doors from March through June. Now reopened, Kacorzyk said that efforts will be made to increase the number of visitors from Asia, including by offering virtual tours of the museum.
"The tragedy is universal," Karcorzyk said. "That's why we also pay attention to the Jewish refugees who were taken in by the city of Shanghai and thanks to that they survived the war. We have organized expositions in Shanghai and Beijing to promote education in China as well."
"The understanding of World War II can never be complete without understanding the Holocaust," Karcorzyk concluded. Enditem
