Introductory panel
The challenges of education in authentic memorial sites
Panel members:
-Bartosz Bartyzel, Spokesman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
-Dr. Anna Ziółkowska, Director of The Martyrs' Museum in Żabikowo and of the Museum of the former German Kulmhof death camp in Chełmno-on-Ner
-Piotr Tarnowski, Director of the Stutthof Museum
Moderator: Andrzej Kacorzyk
Throughout this introductory panel, the speakers, representatives of three main memorial sites in Poland, exposed the educational challenges they are facing in their own institutions. The discussion was led by Andrzej Kacorzyk, who asked the panelists four main questions.
Question n°1: What are the educational challenges that you can identify in your memorial sites and which are the most important ones?
For Dr. Anna Ziółkowska, the most important educational challenge for the museum of the former extermination camp Kulmhof is to make teachers aware of the educational potential of this memorial site. The overall challenge of the museum is to attract more people and make them interested in the place, but she underlined that their aim is to interest teachers “especially”. “The Chełmno camp is a place steeped in history. It can also be relevant to the present, and I was wondering about how attractive educational programs should be created in order to make sure that this memorial site can be recognized by teachers as an important element of the teaching programs, an element that can be used to teach students about the future and human rights. It is especially important because the Kulmhof camp was the first German extermination camp where 200,000 Jews died. […] It was the first camp but it is not widely recognized as such. […] It’s all up to the teachers, it’s up to their commitment whether this memorial site will be visited, whether it will constitute a part of their educational efforts and plans.”
An additional challenge for the memorial site is that it is not located near large cities unlike Majdanek or Auschwitz-Birkenau, which results in even less attractiveness for visitors, teachers and students. In order to face these challenges, the museum have based their educational activities on three pillars: the authenticity of the memorial site, the particularity of the place and reflection. “We want to create a historical narrative around the place. This is what distinguishes us and makes us stand apart from other similar sites. What we don’t have is a range of narratives of witnesses. It was an extermination camp, so we don’t really have direct accounts of the victims. We have indirect accounts, for example, from eye witnesses who saw the transportation of victims directed to the camp.”