Introduction
dr Piotr Trojański
The conference we had in October summarized educational projects which have been carried out for three years between the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The origin of this joint project goes back to the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, in which King Willem-Alexander participated. His wish was to support the Museum in all the actions it was undertaking, especially in education. Therefore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the Museum to prepare a proposal of actions that could be supported by the Dutch government. These actions were aimed at education. That’s why the project was directed to the international team of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, headed by Andrzej Kacorzyk and Marta Berecka, then a director of the Programme Section. Since the very beginning of the conceptual work on the project, we had the idea of including the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which was our main Dutch partner.
Therefore, after some consultations with the Dutch side, we put this proposal to Mr. Levien Rouw and Ms. Karen Polak, with whom we had been collaborating for some time. Let me also mention that our collaboration with the Anne Frank House was really successful, leading to a number of joint projects. The largest was a three-year project entitled “Holocaust Education from a European Perspective”, which was carried out between 2009 and 2012. With regards to the great success of this project, we decided to continue some parts of its activities - such as study visits, aimed at the exchange of the experiences of Polish and Dutch educators - and be open to new challenges, related to Internet education, teaching young leaders and increasing the availability of memorial sites to the people with special needs. Apart from the visits, we observed that both institutions had similar problems with educational objectives and the possibility of connecting the past and the present in education, but also the problem of preserving the authen-ticity of the memorial site while adapting it to various groups of recipients. This resulted in an additional project named “The Future of Auschwitz and Holocaust Education in Authentic Memorial Sites”. We decided to reflect upon the future of authentic memorial sites in general.
One of the main objectives of this project was to make it possible for the Museum and Memorial site to use the mutual experience between the Museum and the Anne Frank House in order to find answers to the following questions: How should we cope with various visiting groups? How can we connect the history of the Holocaust with current teaching about human rights?