International Educational Conference 2025 Post-conference publication | Page 7

"We are a center, a place of meetings, dialogue, reflection, and action. From here, you can see both the former Auschwitz camp and the contemporary world. We believe that this is where questions and ideas should arise about how to confront the hatred that still echoes around us. We are educational because we help people to personally meet the history of Auschwitz and the Shoah. This meeting changes not only the understanding of the past but also the view of the present,” he said.

“Very difficult times. We all are aware of that, and we all feel it,” began his speech Museum Director Dr. Piotr Cywiński, pointing to the main aim of this year’s conference: to discuss memory in the world that “is becoming more and more complex, more and more populist, less and less predictable, and more and more brutal.” Cywiński emphasized that memory and commemoration often took on a rather serious form, connected to the feeling of duty, obligation, and work. “What is the goal of this memory?” he wondered, questioning whether this way of speaking about memory was encouraging enough for 16-17-year-olds, whom we often addressed.

Cywiński spoke about the pressure on people dealing with memory to give answers as to what people should do today and quoted Eli Wiesel, who in his memoir  Night stated that “every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.” Cywiński observed that memory should primarily provide questions, noting that these questions are usually hard, without exact or obvious answers. However, that is where the power of memory lies – in causing the moral uncertainty coming from the memory itself about our thoughts, choices, activities, and about our engagement and even the sense of our life in the long run.∎

Photo: Andrzej Kacorzyk.