Memoria [EN] No. 25 (10/2019) | Page 21

The presentation of the new headquarters was followed by a meeting of the Council of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, presided over by Prof. Marek Kucia.

During the meeting, Andrzej Kacorzyk, the director of the ICEAH, presented a report summarising the activities of the Center from October last year, following the previous meeting of the Council.

‘Naturally, the most important event for us is the creation of the new headquarters, which we present to you today. We will move into the new building at the beginning of next year. What is important is that the first guests at the new headquarters were a group of 12 former Auschwitz prisoners, who we recently hosted at the Memorial as part of an educational project. They were mostly people deported to Auschwitz as children from the Warsaw Uprising. The number of visitors is also growing. All evidence indicates that the number of visitors in 2019 will be higher than last year when 2.152 million people visited the Memorial. For this reason, it was crucial to raise over 20 million PLN for the development of the planned new Visitor Service Centre,’ said Andrzej Kacorzyk.

A particularly important event for the ICEAH recently was the international educational conference “Auschwitz - Never Again! - Really?” The lectures and discussions focused on education in the context of counteracting genocide and crimes against humanity. A summary of the conference can be found in the special August issue of the Memoria magazine.

The meeting also addressed the challenges faced by the 342 educators of the Memorial Site, who already guide visitors in 21 languages, as well as conferences, seminars and educational sessions for teachers, police officers and journalists, as well as for officers of the Prison Services. It also covered exhibitions that were presented at the Memorial, such as the exhibition of works by David Olère, a former Sonderkommando prisoner in Auschwitz, as well as in many places around the world; interns and volunteers; and new lessons prepared as part of E-learning, among others.

Director Kacorzyk mentioned the development of the visitor service system, recruitment and training for guides, organisation of a special study visit for teachers from Japan, as well as English-language studies on the history of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, the “Sonderkommando” exhibition prepared on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the prisoners’ revolt in Birkenau, and a conference dedicated specifically to coordinators of volunteer work, among others.

The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust was founded in 2005 and is an integral part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. It deals with the teaching of the history of the Holocaust and the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. It teaches about the tragic fate of Jews, Poles, the Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, and the fate of all other groups of victims detained and murdered in Auschwitz.

In 2016, the following persons were appointed to the Council of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust:

• Prof. Marek Kucia of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Chairperson

• doc. dr Vojtěch Blodig, deputy director of the Terezín Memorial - Deputy Chairperson

• Dr Wolf Kaiser, former director of the Wannsee Conference House in Berlin

• Prof. Danuta Konieczka-Śliwińska, deputy director for teaching at the Institute of History Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

• Olivier Lalieu from Memorial de la Shoah in Paris

• Dr Piotr Paziński, writer, editor-in-Chief of the monthly “Midrash”

• Karen Pollock, director of the Holocaust Educational Trust

• Dr Irina Scherbakova, from the Memorial Society in Moscow

• Jacek Stawiski, head of the Świat editorial team at the television channel TVN24 Business and the World.

• Prof. Dariusz Stola, director of the POLIN Museum