The presentation of the one of the most important remembrance institutions in the world, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, takes a significant place in the second issue of periodical.
The interview with the Museum’s director, Piotr M.A. Cywiński PhD, touches the matters of Museum’s functioning, financing, logistics and its place in the contemporary remembrance culture – especially considering the fact that the legally established mission of the Auschwitz Place of Memory is to keep the remains of the concentration camp “for all eternity”. The text raises awareness of a wide range of challenges surrounding the need to obtain funds, the enormity of conservation work, the fight against time and nature to preserve the camp’s remains, the millions of visits each year, its archives and efforts to educate on the Holocaust.
Fragments of the interview (full text in PDF):
About contexts of Auschwitz:
“Context is not self-generated, it is not neutrally definable. Every attempt to define the context will itself be a contextualisation; that’s what the adoption of a specific option will really be like. For example, one could show Auschwitz in the context of Germany’s power, in the context of the dehumanisation which was present in what’s called “both totalitarianisms”, with reference to detention camp Bereza Kartuska (just because some inmates were Communists and were imprisoned there), or in terms of failing to deal with the acceptance of homosexuality in Europe—and all of these visions are contextualisations, generally speaking—aimed at eliminating potential opponents. And let’s agree: each of these contexts is a part of the truth. There’s no lie in them. But showing Auschwitz from one single viewpoint would be the creation of a new, false order.”