Contemporary challenges of education at the Auschwitz Memorial

Transcription of the podcast

Why do people come to the memorial site?

This is very interesting because most people who come here do so as part of some programs, some elements of school education, or other forms of education, or in organized groups. They are often aware of what they will see here. They often have previously visited various museums dedicated to the Holocaust in their own countries, or at least those focused on World War II, and yet they want to confront this authenticity, this reality; they want to have their own experience of walking through these grounds. And in my opinion, this desire to go 'through' is a very essential element. This rite of passage, as it would be called in religious studies, is a kind of personal experience that makes the person who enters and the person who leaves at least slightly different individuals, because they have experienced something more. It seems to me that people come here not only to learn but also, in a sense, to experience something.

And do they have a chance to gain some certainty, to touch some kind of foundation in this unstable and uncertain world, in this unpredictable world?

It seems to me that the more difficult the world is to predict, the more we are caught up in this increasingly frantic acceleration, where so much in international relations, in interpersonal relationships, in intergenerational relationships is subject to complete destabilization, the more people seek some strong, stable, enduring, in a sense indisputable elements that allow them to at least partially assess or measure the directions of these changes we live in, which serve as stable reference points. And they can be good or bad, difficult or easy – here we are facing extreme evil, extreme dehumanization, extreme human tragedy. But it is also a very fixed, very strong, very undeniable point. And therefore, it is also a point of reference for a highly changing situation in which many vectors remain entirely difficult to recognize for the future.

Hence, perhaps, a certain connection between crimes, cases of genocide in the contemporary world, and visits to Auschwitz. Is it not the case that people somehow choose Auschwitz, seeking, despite everything, either support in the form of some foundation, or some form of anchoring, or clinging to some hope?

It seems to me that as a point of reference, Auschwitz is not merely a historical event to be viewed by looking back. Because that 'back' is becoming more and more distant over time, in generations, and in some understanding of those cultural, civilizational, technical, and other conditions, including geopolitical ones. It seems to me that if we are talking about a memorial site – that is, about memory itself, which people come here for – they actually come to, based on that point of reference, on looking back, better understand their today, their present, their challenges, their assessment of the need for their own involvement in building such a future rather than another. And this is a very important element.

Therefore, people may come here with a wide variety of today's problems. These may be other genocides. These may be totalitarian policies. These may be problems with extremism, with hate speech, with some other very strong anxieties. But as long as this point of reference remains clear, as such a stable, indisputable point of reference, it will remain a memorial site and not just another historical site among many that does not necessarily have much to tell us. We have many historical sites around the world that are not memorial sites, not because nothing dramatic happened there. These could be battlefields, various other sites, I don't know, temples where human sacrifices were made, and so on. But they are not memorial sites because they no longer create a point of reference that helps us navigate the contemporary world.

And what role will the testimonies of survivors play, will everything that survivors have left behind play? Because we deal every day with the fact that we are now alone.

The role of this will undoubtedly increase significantly. These accounts – I am not talking about published books because there may have been various other influences on mass culture there, including the fact that some of these books have even been made into films – but the testimonies carefully collected by at least several important archival centres around the world were initially collected for judicial purposes on one hand, and historical research on the other. And they did not fundamentally serve any other function. This lasted for at least two or three decades. Only later, gradually, they were actually incorporated into education systems, into memory-building systems, into systems for passing on this memory, into some documents, such as documentary films, or broadcasts of much broader significance. It is now clear that this is the voice that will remain. It may be written, it may be recorded, it may even be filmed, but it is what will remain. And this is a resource that will no longer grow.

There are some attempts to write accounts by the second or third generation, saying that grandpa or grandma told them this or that, but that is not at all the same. And it has no right to be the same. So what remains will actually be the only voice, or is already almost the only voice. On the other hand, all the time it is difficult not to get the impression that many people leaned to this voice, looking there in fact for historical and factual knowledge, and the were not always able to listen or look there for certain premises for building some kind of memory, wisdom, experience, and understanding in general what a human being is.

And how can we, as a generation of witnesses of the witnesses, those of us who are the second or third generation, reach future generations, those seeking to come here, to learn something, to understand more? Do we have the same chance as they did, or are we at a disadvantage from the start?

In my opinion, as long as we continue to carry their voice, preferably through direct quotations, without it being processed through our post-war imagination, we will remain credible. If this history remains a credible history, it has a chance of enduring as a memory and a reference point. If we start telling the story in our own language, adapting it to cultural changes or generational shifts, at some point we will lose this credibility because the memory will be perceived less as a stable reference point and more as something culturally modified – a bit like this here, a bit differently elsewhere. It’s somewhat akin to speaking entirely differently to visitors from Asia, who are influenced by Confucian thought and its worldview, compared to visitors from Europe, who, whether consciously or not, are shaped by philosophical thought or a social order rooted much more in Greek philosophy or Roman law. And yet differently again, to visitors from, let’s say, Sub-Saharan Africa. That approach just doesn’t work. We’re not talking here about culturally specific values meant to resonate solely with a particular group. We’re talking about completely fundamental values. If we recognize that the drama at Auschwitz involved not only life and death but also a process of unimaginable, monstrous dehumanization, then this is something that can speak to every human being, every culture, every civilization, every philosophical or religious system, because we are dealing with fundamental matters. As long as we refer to these fundamental issues, we will show that Auschwitz concerns approaching, encountering, and possibly even crossing the boundaries of humanity, and this will remain a comprehensible message.

If I understand correctly, it’s primarily about not defining the goals ourselves, but rather listening to what happened here, to continue listening to the voices and the messages that the witnesses wanted to convey, rather than using them to push our own agenda, so to speak.

Absolutely, not to use them. However, I would like to add one more element that I consider completely fundamental. Referring to a famous quote from Elie Wiesel’s book "Night," where at one point he recalls a fellow prisoner who says that every question contains a power that is no longer present in the answer. I believe that if we, as guides at Auschwitz, as people whose mission is to present everything that Auschwitz encompasses, were to provide answers, we would drastically diminish our mission. We don’t know who is visiting, what issues they are dealing with, or what their understanding is. Furthermore, we don’t know who this person will be in ten years, and a single visit can influence an entire life, bearing fruit only ten or fifteen years later. We also don’t know what the world will look like in fifteen years or what challenges people will be facing then. I think that the primary mission of the memorial site is to pose questions. A person passing through Auschwitz must ask themselves certain questions or must receive them, sense them, maybe even hear them. Although this sounds like conscious interference, there are questions that must be voiced here, and one has to grapple with them for a long time afterward. One fundamental aspect of our message is the words of the survivors; the other is enabling people to ask themselves difficult questions. It is definitely not our role to provide answers.

Now, let me ask something entirely different: new technologies. In which areas of the Museum will, for instance, artificial intelligence be present? Is there a possibility that it could become a partner in this conversation, in posing questions to visitors?

Whenever a technological change arises, these kinds of questions and doubts always emerge. I remember when websites first appeared, there were long discussions about whether it was appropriate for memorial sites to even have a website. It was a serious debate among thoughtful people. Later on, there were various technological advancements, such as the ability to ask questions to a pre-recorded survivor, and based on keywords, a computer would display a response that roughly matched the question because dozens of hours of answers had been recorded. The system would try to capture the essence of the question. Looking back, both of these events seem almost amusing, as it’s clear today that a website is a daily work tool, and nothing bad happened when memorial sites got their own pages. The system of automated responses, however, aged poorly. People now see it more as a gadget than something that could meaningfully contribute to education or cognitive understanding.

Regarding artificial intelligence – we’ll see how it evolves. I wouldn’t fall into dramatic panic here. I think the world will manage it somehow – I mean manage in a civilizational sense, in terms of intellectual processing and understanding how to work with it. In memorial sites, I see AI as a useful tool but not as a source of knowledge. When someone treats AI as a source, for example, by asking what a particular author was thinking while writing a specific book, they make a significant mistake. At best, AI will show what someone else wrote that the author might have thought, because no one can truly know that. More often than not, the system will just start fabricating elements of the response that will sound absurd. So, I mainly see a distinction between whether we are talking about a tool or a source. If we treat it as a source, we completely misunderstand it. AI cannot be a source. However, as a tool, I see great potential, for example, in organizing and deeply structuring indexes of archived and digitized documents, or in supporting research that is more precise, such as deep statistical analysis of camp data. In these kinds of applications, I see no problem. It would then be used correctly, as a tool.

Let me ask one last question: on whom and on what will education about Auschwitz and the Shoah be based in the coming years?

I believe that these foundations will not change at all, but the reality in which they will exist will be completely different. All education, or more broadly than education, the entire formation, this entire rite of passage, this work on understanding – which is certainly something deeper than education – will be based on the authenticity of the memorial site, on the authenticity of the survivors' words, and on the ability to create – and this is where the role of educators, guides, and all of us is enormous – the ability to create that moral unease with which a person should leave such an experience.

“Memory” is a word that is actually very close to the word “experience,” only it is something acquired rather than personally lived. And I believe that this moral anxiety – which is the ability to ask oneself questions, accompanied by a certain fear that the answers may be very demanding, very difficult, or not immediately clear – is what memory is meant to serve. And this rite of passage through memory, the acquisition of this memory, is to a large extent the ability not to reject, not to silence, but rather to think, sometimes for a long time, about what are my own, individual answers, or at least my own clues, even if I do not have answers, to the most difficult questions about humanity, about human nature, and about myself. No matter how much the world changes, this will not change, and this, I believe, is the most important function of memory.

Thank you very much, but I will allow myself to ask one more question. You have spoken here about the survivors, about the traces of history, but isn’t this inner dimension, with its additional questions and this additional unease, found in what the prisoners left behind without words? I mean camp art. Will that be one of the pillars of this place’s message?

Indeed, in the Auschwitz collections, we have over 4,000 works of art, which were either created in the camp by prisoners or after liberation by survivors but focused on camp themes. Landscapes or other unrelated works were never really collected here. I consider this art as a source just as serious as the written accounts, but it has its own specificity. It has its own specificity because an image does not require words. An image conveys certain emotions, impressions, and feelings directly, in a non-verbal way, and this is also a very important experience because the non-verbal transmission from survivors was also a crucial part of their interactions with future generations. There were silences, there were glances, there were unspoken words in all those conversations with survivors. It's not that only words play a role. What is left unsaid, what is unspoken, does not mean that it does not exist. It exists in some sense.

After all, in their trauma, there were topics that survivors rarely discussed. We all know that they only spoke about what they thought we would understand and what they believed would be somehow useful to us. So this art is a relatively new, rather difficult question, but one that can convey certain things non-verbally. It can, therefore, engage in dialogue with very different cultures, generations, social groups, with shades of political, religious, or social trends. And it can essentially convey what was always asked in meetings between young people – students or pupils – and survivors: “What did you feel when you were in the camp?”
This art, when truly understood up close, when grasped, makes it very clear that it can perfectly convey the human experience under conditions of dehumanization. Where are the boundaries when a living person still behaves like a human being, and when do exhaustion, starvation, and torment take away even those seemingly fundamental human behaviors? And this can truly be expressed without a word. And I hope that this collection will serve in this way, that in the coming years, in the camp kitchen building in Auschwitz I – a building that is currently somewhat of an empty space – we will manage to create, based at least on a selection of these works, an exhibition without words that will lead the visitor through those human emotions, through that humanity that is oppressed to the very end, to the point when a person stops fighting for it and quickly disappears.
I think that, compared to exhibitions that are more about facts, about the evolution, about the institution of the camp, about transports, and so on, there is a need to also tell the story of the inner world of a human being in a very profound way, not necessarily expressed in words, because the inner world of a person is difficult to capture in words. And while if we were to tell this story ourselves, it would be our own projection, our own imagination. But I believe this art is capable of carrying forward that eternal question: “What did you feel when you were in the camp?” We are probably the only ones in the world who are able to do this because it is only here that such a large collection on one place was created.

Thank you very much for this exceptionally interesting conversation, which can be described as a journey – more like a mountain climb through the spirituality of Dr. Piotr Cywiński. Thank you very much.

Thank you.