“The use of those materials was designed to offer the chance for an indirect vicarious kind of meeting with those who lived through Auschwitz, and it is meant to be a sort of intimate encounter with the suffering of this place and people who experienced that suffering.” Concerning testimonies, he said: “We used the testimonies of various survivors, Jewish, Polish, Roma, Dutch and so on and so forth, so that the story of that dehumanizing experience of Auschwitz, in this faceless place, could be re-humanized and given human faces again. So that survivors’ individual stories and their emotions could be placed against the backdrop of the bigger history of this place.” These testimonies offer a more tangible and palpable knowledge of Auschwitz.
He concluded his presentation by enhancing the importance of dedicating time for “a reflection on Auschwitz.” For him, “the aim of history is to educate critically thinking citizens of the modern world. 99% of our students, or 99.9%, will not be professional historians. Citizens of the modern world who wish to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors and ancestors, from the human potential to do evil, and who will decide to do the exact opposite by being open-minded and accepting. Our goal as educators, including history educators and especially Holocaust and genocide educators, is to do exactly this: to shape our students into tolerant, accepting, open-minded people who will themselves be active in designing a better world. These might be big words but I do believe in them. From the very start, we knew that the lesson must have clear ethical content: the cognition of historical facts that serves to pose a number of important questions about human nature, its positive and negative side, about what is praiseworthy, commendable in human nature and what is reprehensible in human nature. Historical facts about human history also let students, or at least should let students, ask vital questions and reach conclusions about today and for today. […] We have to show them a way and hopefully the last bit of the lesson, a lesson in itself, is about what should be done. It is about attitude, it is about conduct, it is about the perception of society, it is about democracy, it is about acceptance and I think that, paradoxically, it is even more important today.”
Link to the e-lesson: http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/31_przygotowanie_do_wizyty_en/
Also available in Dutch: http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/31_przygotowanie_do_wizyty_nl/