“How do we explain, working in a memorial site, that history is not what matters most? Why do visitors need to remember dates and figures if they are beyond comprehension? It is quite difficult to explain things in thousands - why should they remember these specific data? Will it affect their life? Not necessarily. […] The world is changing and we need to change our definition concerning our approach to education. Our mission is empathy, compassion and some positive connotations and examples.” Being a special needs educator completely makes sense in his eyes as far as education is concerned. He is trying to bring changes and a positive impact in their lives and he is learning a lot from them in return. The Museum is implementing projects with special educational needs schools that “help people to believe in themselves because they are often treated inferiorly, including from the perspective of the country; they are hidden in the corner, in the peripheries.” They are very surprising young students that simply need courage and many have found it throughout the project with the Stutthof Museum.
The second project he presented is a special program for juvenile correction institutions. “What can you do with boys who have already committed their first crime? They are waiting for prison, they have their first sentences and society has already sentenced them. What can you do about them? You can sensitize them. You can prepare study visits and work together.” During their stay, they perform intellectual and physical work and they are interact not only with the Museum but also the surroundings. The Museum educators do not give them any dates, figures or dry facts but they put the accent on empathy, in a permanent dialogue; they discover that others can be good people as well. “Many of them come from incomplete families, they have nowhere to return. A former Stutthof prisoner meets them frequently, he is the grandfather of the entire group. This is a kind of a starting point for believing that you can be better.”
The third programme they are implementing is “Living Memory”. It consists of going into prisons to talk with prisoners who sometimes have committed more serious crimes. “What should I tell them about? […] I am talking about good and evil. You cannot cheat yourself as to whether you are good or evil. We can see that in human life, nothing is changed once and for all. You always have a choice, like in a camp. You could object, stay yourself, preserve your own dignity, but you were punished for that.” They should understand and remember that they have a choice. “These people are just average people, so good and evil is for them the key to understand the issue.”
Dr. Marcin Owsiński hopes that these projects make them think, reflect and makes sense to them. Sometimes the Museum doesn’t know what has happened to them after these programs. But sometimes they are rewarded with messages like the following extract, received two years after the participation of a girl in a project implemented for a juvenile correction centre: “It was the first time that I was in such a beautiful and sad place at the same time. I would also like to thank you for presenting the history to me and I would like to thank you for telling me the story of the hell that happened there. Perhaps it was my own feeling, but when I was visiting the camp, I felt as if those people were together with us. But it was only my own feeling. Thanks to the atmosphere there, I can better appreciate my life. Although I live in Silesia, I will visit the camp again because it helped me to have a different vision of the world. People who have seen the camp once are different people at the end of the visit.”
He concluded by saying: “This is not history, it is empathy and reflection. Perhaps we cannot make them better people, at least not all of them, but perhaps to some degree we are able to change the world. This is our experience, which gives us a lot of satisfaction and is worth sharing.”
The third speaker was Gabriel Dittrich, a member of Campus Christophorus Jugendwerk, an education center that was first established in 1946 to welcome orphans, semi-orphans and children in difficult conditions after the war. For the last 20 years, the center has been welcoming boys aged between 13 and 21 years old who are directed to the education center by the authorities. They began to organize visits to Auschwitz 25 years ago when they received in their center the “first young people with short hair and special boots who started acting as if they were Nazis.” It was decided that the Campus Christophorus Jugendwerk will take over the guardianship of the children’s barrack in the women’s camp, and they have taken care of it ever since.
Every year, four boys come to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. “We come to Auschwitz with our wards, with young boys who have problems related to their background. They had problems at home, they had problems at school. Many of them, or most of them, were expelled from school. […] Ultimately they come to us and we provide them with a certain level of education and we also offer vocational education. […] They can become a carpenter, a joiner, a locksmith, a bicycle assembler as well, which is a very popular profession right now.” For the last two or three years, they also have been taking care of immigrants, underage refugees who have crossed the border in Basel. They work in mixed groups of native Germans and refugees.