Summary of the conference
Closing statement by Dr. Piotr Trojański:
“Hopefully this conference was an intellectual adventure, one that has been fruitful for us and that will inspire us to keep working. We attempted to answer the question about the future of Auschwitz and Holocaust education in authentic memorial sites. As you know, this was the title of our project, and we have been considering this question for three years. Today has been an attempt at summarizing our considerations and thoughts. We have made some headway but we still need to answer some questions. It is important, as the Director said, that we don’t rule out any possibilities. There are many possible scenarios, many possible directions. We have discussed them at this conference and we gained additional insights thanks to the fact that experience was shared, social research and social studies were presented and they concern things happening in Auschwitz and at other memorial sites. Thanks to all this, we can actually take stock of the situation; we know where we are but it is very difficult to anticipate things and to foresee how things will unfold.
We need to open up to new technologies, that is a most certain thing and certain conclusion from this last discussion. Hopefully this modern technology will support us. We also mentioned in the inauguration panel that we need to bear in mind that VR and multimedia are supposed to help us educate. They cannot disturb us and derail us. Another important element is documenting and making exhibitions available to people with special needs, of course, and we talked about it today through looking at wonderful projects in Poland. Our colleagues from Poland and from abroad discussed various projects implemented at memorial sites and, as a museum, we are open to any suggestions and proposals, even those that will help us to change the way we work, the routine way in which we work. I think we should adopt a broader perspective, we should look at the bigger picture. We shouldn’t just limit ourselves to groups of people with disabilities, we should also look at the - let’s say - fully able-bodied visitors, to see that they are a diverse group, they are a broad church themselves. We think that we should share with the teachers who conduct the right preparations and are aware of what the site is. We should share with them the specific responsibility of what it means to work at a memorial site. We need to humbly look and understand that some people might know better than we do about how to educate people, because these are people who work with the youth on a daily basis. We should respect their import as well. Hopefully we will be able to develop a satisfactory win-win collaboration model. Another reflection that I would like to share with you is a reflection about the role that history should play in our work. We have heard repeatedly that history is losing relevance, and this is true not only if we are talking about people with special needs; it is also true of mainstream education. We should think about when we should start to tell the story. How far back we should look to? And where should we stop? Should we should stop with contemporary times? Yes we should, but of course, the question of proportion is very important. We should juxtapose certain types of genocides with one another. History is becoming a thing from the past. There are more and more things to teach with every single day that passes by. But of course, history must be taught for the sake of the present and obviously it is an open question as to whether we should do that at memorial sites such as Auschwitz. Or maybe we should do it through institutions that collaborate with us? It turns out that they already do. They do that and they are quite effective in their efforts. Another important element is the role that we play in the so-called education chain. This has also been mentioned several times here. We are just a building block, we are just a piece of a bigger puzzle and so we need to work better with schools and NGOs because if we don’t, we will never achieve a long-term effect.
We need to work together more closely, in a more intensive way. We need to think about what we have to do to better prepare students for the visit and what we should do to make them reflect upon the visit once it is over. Maybe there should be some time for reflection even here. Maybe we should dedicate less time to the visit itself, which might be quite controversial to some of you, but maybe we should think about giving young people some more time to reflect, actually to reflect on the topics? We know that you can stay here in Oświęcim, in Auschwitz for several days - three or eight hours might not be enough - but we have to remember that there are some issues of perception capabilities of young people and there are also organizational issues. We need to keep working, keep improving, becoming more and more