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.
The boys selected to visit the Museum are a minimum of 16 years old. “If they are over 16 we also hope that they will basically understand more of what we want to offer them. We come here to Oświęcim, we visit the synagogue, we visit the city, we visit the International Youth Meeting Centre and we book a tour guide for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.” They usually work with the same guide every year because it is important that the guide is adapted to the group, that he or she knows where they come from and in which situation they have developed. “Sometimes they have difficulties with articulating their thoughts and one needs to understand that. […] Our boys need to take breaks, they need to have some time off [during the visit].” If adults that are accompanying them “see that, for example, some of the boys need more time or they are overloaded with information, then the boys can approach me, my colleague or a different adult and they can leave the camp accompanied by us. We don’t want to keep them there by force if they cannot cope with certain things.”
On the second day, they visit Birkenau and during the evening they organize workshops and discuss what they saw and learned during the visits. Every year they also dedicate a few hours of their time to help preserve the Memorial site. “I was afraid that the boys would ask me why they were supposed to collect so many fallen leaves, but we did it and basically I didn’t have to explain anything because one of the boys approached me and said “Ok, that’s a nice thing that we are doing because otherwise, the ground would be totally covered with dead leaves.” It is the kind of work that is necessary for the Memorial site to be preserved and the boys do understand that.”
Their institution has also undertaken fundraising and campaigns to preserve the children’s barrack with the boys. They wrote a letter, for example, to artists in their region to donate their work to organize an auction and invest the money collected in the preservation of the barrack. This overall project with the Museum helps them to better understand what it means to live in a community, preserve a memorial place and try to feel reciprocity and love.