From the beginning, the main purpose for us was to make Auschwitz accessible at all times. […] With time we understood that we would be developing an educational tool. […] What made us succeed in the end was that we believed in it from day one and what made it possible beyond the tech and the content. We really believed it was the right thing to do, to bring the history into the future. We wanted to create a connection,
but more than anything, our faith, passion, and purpose guided us.
Wojciech Soczewica: Aya, as the creative director, could you please share with us how is it possible to take testimonies and historical facts, then develop an app out of it to present it through screens?
Aya Feldman: To begin with, we all understand that nothing can replace coming
to Auschwitz physically. This new visitor behavior needed to be understood, and it highlighted the differences between our in-person visitors and those online.
That perspective also initiated the name. This is “Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes”, not under your feet, which is different. We understand that visitors are sitting in a room, somewhere in the world, in front of a screen. We have contact with audiences larger than anyone could actually imagine because this technology allows us to provide access
and reach further than just those coming physically to Auschwitz. We worked closely with Tomasz, Zuza, and Wojtek, taking numerous tours of all the museum's departments and its many treasures. It is so overwhelming, there is so much content. You can’t tell
the history of Auschwitz in 1.5 hours, or 1.5 months, or years. From all this content, we had to choose the one storyline that we can provide for the basic standard tour for all types of audiences. How can we customize it? What do they expect? How do we bring the context so that different visitors with different understanding or knowledge
of the Holocaust can all take the same tour? We needed to study visitor behavior
and also the guides perspective because now we have guides who are doing something completely different to what they are used to. We understand that the technology allows us to step out of the exhibition spaces and tell the story of Auschwitz where it had taken place. We can take the geography of the tour and communicate the content,
the information, where it happened. You can have layers of content that are only
on a screen and cannot be shared in person. We can include the different information from the archives, from the collections, from the exhibitions, testimonies, within
the tour. We create different exclusive parts in the tour that are not available live because of conservation, but can be shared through the screen. Before all this, we needed to understand the values of the museum, which is authenticity, truth, and person-to-person contact. This is a story that needs to be told by people to people. This is evidence, these are facts, everything in this tour is authentic, historically proven,
and fact checked. Spoken testimonies are accurate. The details here are extremely sensitive. There is so much to choose from, but there is also this big void of everything we can’t show. We created a tour that is not competing with the on-site tour, it is complementary. We recommend you to take it before or after and include it
in educational programs. It is a different medium, through a screen and still preserves these core values of authenticity and human connections.
Wojciech Soczewica: Guides/educators were not able to host visitors during the pandemic. What did it mean for you to be able to expand the tours to remote and digital visits?
Tomasz Michaldo: We all believe that the new tool is a huge revolution, but what I think was important in terms of training the guides was to convince them that it is not
a revolution. It is something they do on a regular basis. If we tell them and frighten them that it’s completely new and difficult, we wouldn’t have guides involved in the project.