We might make our voice, our legacy, be experienced, be felt, be present, hoping that the voice of memory sites, strengthened by other organizations or institutions, will be able to change the world for the better,” wisely said the spokesman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.
But none of them lost hope that memorial sites’ actions are crucial and very important to make things change:
“We know that what we are doing is important. […] How many of them [events that could change history] would there be if they hadn’t been stopped by our talks? About what consequences there might be of genocides, of hatred and lack of tolerance?” – Dr. Anna Ziółkowska.
“Without being naïve, our world wouldn’t make any sense if we didn’t believe in our ability to change the world.” – Bartosz Bartyzel.
After these four main questions, the discussion about the challenges of education in authentic memorial sites opened up to the audience. Alicja Bialecka, working at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum on the new main exhibition and as a guide shared her experience. She explained that the attitudes of groups she is guiding have changed through time. When she began to guide many years ago, visitors were often shocked and tended to say “How this could have happened? Never again!” But nowadays reactions are very different. None of them are saying “Never again!” anymore. People are starting to be afraid again. “I believe that we should be doing what we are doing because a few hundred thousand people, or millions of people who visit us every year, communicate their experience to others. Perhaps they will tell somebody that there is a place that testifies to something that happened. We should keep talking about it, we should believe and we should think that our work is really important.”
Piotr Tarnowski added the idea that in order to reach visitors more efficiently, “the communication, the message should be adapted to the recipient and their perspective of history.” Memorial sites should interact with their visitors to understand their needs. “We have the right to have some objectives, but we need to find a very good balance between what we should communicate and what is expected by the other side.”
The discussion was then oriented towards the role of teachers. An educator, Jakub Niewiński, was asking for more trust by memorial sites towards teachers to guide their own students, to which the representatives of the museums responded that unfortunately too many teachers come with their students being unprepared for the visit. The good faith of one among many cannot be relied upon. The guides trained by the memorial sites are educated and prepared to transmit the legacy of these sites as efficiently as possible. But they agreed on the fact that they should work hand in hand with teachers for the sake of young generations. The role of teachers should be focused on the pre-visit, to prepare their students properly, and after the visit, to make them reflect on what they saw, what they learned. The ability to enable students to express their thoughts and feelings, and draw conclusions and values from the visit, rests in the hands of teachers.