STUDY VISIT FOR AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU
MUSEUM GUIDES
ORGANIZED
BY YAHAD-IN UNUM
Since 2018, the French organization Yahad-In Unum has been working with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum by conducting specialized training seminars for the Museum guides. The Yahad-In Unum Foundation, whose main focus is field research in Central and Eastern Europe on the Holocaust by bullets, organized a two-day study visit for the guides this year for the first time.
Yahad In-Unum
The visit's main objective was to work on less known and often unmemorialized sites related to the Holocaust, as well as to meet with eyewitnesses. The field trip program was centered around tracing the fate of Jewish communities that found themselves in the Miechów County before the war and during the German occupation, particularly in places like Miechów, Działoszyce, Dzierążnia, and Słomniki. ‘We are pleased that we could organize this study visit for two groups of guides. It is important for us to expand our knowledge of the local dimension of the Holocaust and reach out to scattered sites of executions and burials of Jews throughout the region,’ said Michał Chojak, Director of Yahad-In Unum Research Center. ‘Such a field trip provides the opportunity for multidimensional work based on archival sources and an understanding of the topography of sites related to various stages of local Jewish population extermination. We also had the chance to meet with a history witness, Ms. Marianna, who is over one hundred years old. Such individuals are becoming increasingly rare," he added.
The main goal of the visit was to reconstruct the chronology of events during various stages of the murder of local Jewish population extermination with the course of Operation Reinhardt. In Miechów, the participants walked through the streets of the former ghetto, reached an unmemorialized burial site of those shot during the June 1942 deportations near the railway tracks, from which most were transported to Bełżec. They also visited the site of execution and burial of 630 Jewish men, women, and children in the Chodówki Forest. In Działoszyce, they explored the ruins of the synagogue and a mass grave of over 1500 victims, shot on-site during the ghetto liquidation operation. An unmarked burial site for 33 individuals in Dzierążnia, a small village a few kilometers from Działoszyce, allowed for discussion about the survival strategies of Jews during the third phase of the Holocaust in the region.
"This is a very valuable experience for me and my colleagues who participate in these seminars because it offers a different perspective from what we typically discuss with Museum visitors. It also shows what we can add to our daily work, presenting the history of Polish Jews and those from other countries who perished in this region in a new light," summarized Artur, a guide at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
The next editions of Yahad-In Unum field seminars will likely take place in 2024.