DEEP VIEW
Memory of Tomorrow
Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński
Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
State Museum
W
hether visitor attendance is good or poor, whether it grows or remains stable,
is not the essence of the matter. Attendance seen in terms of a sacred, annual
number is really just a museum fetish.
What is more important than admiring the attendance is trying to understand and
organise it. This is where the external element, the will of a person or of a group of people
to come to the Memorial Site, ends, and where the work of the people responsible for this
Memorial begins. It might be why we keep comparing total attendance so much, but often
fail to carry out an in-depth analysis of its composition or work consciously to develop it.
But isn’t this one of our basic tasks?
It is easy complain about the development of tourism, looking at what some have
called ‘dark tourism’ with distrust and suspicion, and complaining that we are not alone as
we walk around the post-camp area. Of course we would all prefer to be on our own at such
a difficult moment. Everyone thinks that they are the most aware, that they know how to
behave in the best and most sensitive way, what to ask, when to nod and keep silent. Other
people are a distraction. When you are standing face to face with humanity, hell is indeed
other people – especially those we suspect of being tourists or of having tourist intentions,
tourist opinions, tourist needs. Those who, in our opinion, came to the Memorial Site by
accident, on their way between the beach and the restaurant, the hotel and castle ruins,
the canoe and the camp site. Those who were lured from their hotel by accident, brought
in mini-buses, organised into groups. Those who, in our exalted opinion, can’t have read
Primo Levi or Elie Wiesel. Those whose sin is the fact that they don’t know anyone who
suffered or died here. By accident.
I am always amused and sometimes annoyed by this common high-flown treatment
of the borderline between remembrance and tourism. Yes, even if we are talking about the
18
Observing Memories
ISSUE 3