Presentation
Guides exchange
Speaker: Tomasz Michaldo, ICEAH, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
As part of the project, the Netherlands welcomed 16 guides/educators from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum to dive into the history of the Second World War from the perspective of their country. They also had the chance to have a close look at authentic memorial sites and their functioning. The exchange of guides is an important component because “let’s remember that Auschwitz Museum guides actually reach more than 1.5 million visitors every single year, so we want them to be people who keep developing. We need people who don’t only focus on giving the tour to one particular group. We want them to be people who have the opportunity to keep on developing, also thanks to the support offered by the Museum.”
The overall objective of this trip was to understand and to grasp the cultural differences and historical specificities of the Netherlands to better understand Dutch visitors coming to Auschwitz and thus better guide them. “We managed to get a better insight into the kind of people who later visit us and the people to whom we offer guided tours.”
The trip was divided into two parts, one consisting of a visit of Amsterdam and its various memorial sites and the second revolving around a visit to the Westerbork Museum.
During the first part, participants had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the history of Amsterdam and particularly with the story of its Jewish inhabitants, their pre-war heritage and their fate during the Holocaust. The success of the visit to Amsterdam lay with the guide, who was a Polish woman living in the Netherlands for a long time. “She offered us a new glimpse of the Netherlands and the Dutch people, she offered an outsider’s point of view. […] She knows the culture extremely well and the mind-set of the Dutch people, so she offered another perspective on the locals and the city itself.”
Another key element of the study tour in the Netherlands was the visit to the Anne Frank House. Apart from a tour of the museum, the group of guides had the chance to encounter “the staff members, historians and researchers working in the area of the Holocaust and the history of the totalitarian regime in the Netherlands. These meetings showed us the differences between the educational system in the Netherlands and in Poland. In Poland we have this master-apprentice model, whereas in the Netherlands it’s more of a dialogue and this is also what we sense when we give tours to young Dutch people. We know that we can talk to them, that they are eager to engage in a dialogue with us.”
The visit to the Portuguese Synagogue and the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam (where both Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities have their part) enabled the guides to better understand the complexity of pre-war Jewish life in Amsterdam. “I found it very interesting that both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities were featured at the Museum and we often tend to forget that amongst the Dutch Jews were many Portuguese Jews, those that were expelled from Portugal and Spain.”
The Holocaust period was presented both during the whole-day visit to the Anne Frank House and the still-unfinished National Holocaust Museum and Hollandsche Schouwburg (one of Amsterdam’s deportation centres). “It is a very new facility and it also offered us a glimpse of a new philosophy of how we can talk about the Holocaust.”
The second part of the program was a full-day visit to Westerbork Memorial, which was the main transit camp for around 90,000 Dutch Jews before deportation to either the Auschwitz or Sobibór death camps. Guides had the opportunity to visit the premises of the former camp, familiarize themselves with the exhibition in the Museum and to find out more about the Museum activities as well as about the expectations and needs of Dutch visitors.
One of the most interesting activities of the Westerbork Memorial is the use of new educational tools, for instance, Virtual Reality.
“I think this guided tour showed us and gave us pointers as to how we should behave and what we could also do when we give tours in Auschwitz. We were also shown new educational techniques that relied on virtual reality solutions. It was also a very interesting topic but I think it would be very difficult or impossible to use the same techniques at the Auschwitz Museum. I might be quite orthodox or conservative in terms of these issues, but I do believe that you need a human being to actually give and describe the details of these very touching stories.”
To conclude, Tomasz Michaldo stated that the overall experience of the study tour “opened up new avenues and perspectives for their [tour guides’] own development.”