History of education at the Auschwitz Memorial

Transcription of the podcast

Let’s start with the question: how did it happen that you ended up working at the Museum?

Well, there’s no big sensation or lofty mission here. I should go back to the fact that I belong to the generation that, first of all, was raised in the atmosphere of wartime stories—that first postwar generation. And at home, we constantly heard about it—I say “we,” because this applies not just to me but to my classmates and friends too. It was always there. After all, that era was taken away from my parents, that prime period of young adulthood; they’d basically been deprived of it, so they talked about it a lot. That’s first.

Second, I attended high school in Oświęcim. So the Museum—and thus the camp and its history—were part of our school life. That presence wasn’t just limited to what the school curriculum included in history or Polish literature classes, but we would actually go to the grounds of the former camp in different capacities—sometimes even as greeters for official delegations, because this was the 1960s, still deeply Communist times. But even if we were required to do so, those visits somehow carried over into our conversations about the history of that place.

During my university studies—I majored in Polish Philology—this “literature of the crematoria,” as it was then called, was close to me. Since I couldn’t really envision myself teaching in a school, I was more thinking of some publishing house or editorial team. So once I graduated and got my degree, I simply came here to ask if there might be a job opening for me. And it turned out there was. That was 1971. I was hired in what was then called the “Educational Department.” Later I indeed spent many years working in the publishing department. And in 1990, I became the deputy director of the Museum.

When you were starting out, there were still survivors here—former Auschwitz prisoners. Director Smoleń was one of them...

Director Smoleń was a Survivor. Mr. Szymański also worked here—he was actually the one who hired me, since Director Smoleń wasn’t around at that moment. Among the guides there were also survivors. And at least twice a year, there were meetings of the International Auschwitz Committee. Director Smoleń served as the Secretary General of the International Auschwitz Committee. In January, survivors would gather for what they used to call clubs. So they were just part of our daily life here at work—and at various major events as well.

They were the driving force behind the educational work, but eventually the idea of establishing the International Center for Education arose. How did that come about?

The International Center is the end result, really. I’d like to go back to the very origins. In my view, what we today call educational activity was started immediately by survivors. When you or I look at the guest books—reviewing them—you can see that in 1946 already, school groups were coming to the grounds of the former camp. And that oft-repeated (and sometimes worn-out) phrase “Never again” appears in them. That was the mission of the survivors. The Museum as an institution did not yet exist, but they were already on guard duty—really not even as a formal Museum guard. They would guide people around the former camp. They felt it was important. Many of those who visited the site back then were survivors who had not stayed connected to the place after liberation, but primarily it was the families of those who had not survived the camp, searching for some trace—obviously not a grave, because they knew none existed—but some evidence of where their loved ones suffered and died. But as I said, there were also organized school groups. And they were guided around so that the younger generation would know what had taken place here, but also so that they would learn to live differently, so that, as people said over and over, “never again” such a tragedy would occur.

In later years—I’m not sure when exactly it started—when the Museum had already become quite established and was steadily growing in size, there was this initiative of traveling lectures. Staff members from practically every department would head out, sometimes for a whole week, to various towns in Poland, far from Oświęcim, and deliver lectures. These focused largely on the history of the camp. They also had an educational goal: not merely to teach, but in some sense to nurture people for the good of society and for peace.

Paradoxically, that educational activity dominated, because practically all Museum staff—or at least a large majority—were guides.

Yes, it was mandatory. Even if staff at the Archives or the Research Department weren’t keen on it, they still had to serve as guides. That was automatically required. And from what I understand, Mr. Szymański—who was initially head of the Education Department and later head of the Collections Department; after he left, Ms. Emeryka Iwaszko took over in the Education Department—placed huge importance on that requirement and consistently insisted that all substantive staff members do guiding of visitors.

Tadeusz Szymański, a survivor of KL Auschwitz, and Emeryka Iwaszko, who headed the Educational Department for many, many years—they basically laid the groundwork for those large-scale lecture initiatives, as far as I understand.

I believe so. Now, if I can add some personal perspective: we started—when I was not yet a deputy director, and later more intensively in the early nineties—our cooperation with teachers. The main reason was how to prepare young people for their visit to Auschwitz. The guides would complain that sometimes students didn’t behave in a manner appropriate to this place, that they got impatient. It’s hard for me to say how many groups or how big a problem it was. I recall that I also used to accompany numerous school groups, and quite often a survivor would be there with them. And to be honest, that was common practice. In almost every place you could find a survivor: a grandfather, an uncle, a neighbour who had been incarcerated in Auschwitz. And they would accompany some of these groups. And yes, it was problematic for the guides. So we started by holding meetings with teachers from the region, from Oświęcim, from the Oświęcim district.

Probably from the Bielsko province too, because this was still the seventies…

Yes, from other districts as well. We wanted to hammer out some model of how to prepare the students, what we wanted. We didn’t want them to prep the students extensively on the camp’s history—that was the guide’s role and the purpose of the trip—but to let them know, obviously, where they were going, what sort of place it was, and why a particular kind of behaviour—quiet, respectful—was required or expected. Mind you, it’s not like all the groups misbehaved. For many young people—these were mostly seventh or eighth graders at the time—spending several hours here was shocking. Yet, it was definitely an issue.

By the time the formal notion of creating the International Center for Education emerged—written down on paper—it was the early 1990s. I wrote a brief project proposal for an American foundation called “PIU.” Director Wróblewski, Teresa Świebocka, and Teresa Zbrzeska were visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington at the time. They had discussions with representatives of that foundation. The aim was to find sponsors, basically to raise money for various Museum undertakings, including the so-called “computer section.” Those were the Museum’s first computers. The idea was extremely concise, not even fleshed out, just a concept. Later, I developed it more for a conference at Yad Vashem about education, which I don’t remember the exact year, but it was also in the first half of the nineties. Essentially, it was consistent with the principles that would appear in the official document founding the International Education Center. The proposed headquarters for the Center, in my idea, was also the Theatergebäude. I’m very pleased that today, this large, genuinely international center is indeed housed in that building.

The driving factors behind establishing the Center included that increasing distance in time from the war, the fact that survivors were passing away, that we were quickly losing direct witnesses who remembered Auschwitz and could tell us about it. But there were also new international challenges, I think, that accompanied all of this, as well as significant growth in the Museum’s international contacts in the 1990s, which the Museum initiated in the 1990s. Among them were those trips to Israel or that bilateral exchange between Israel and Poland. How do you recall those early trips to Israel?

It was quite a big deal. I personally did not go in the first group, but I can say that really the very first group’s departure was the realization of one of my educational dreams: for an exchange like that to happen, for contacts to happen at all. We should also remember that, regarding Jews, we basically learned about them—or course, we knew that a huge number of Auschwitz’s victims were Jews, that the transports sent straight to the gas chambers were Jewish transports. But as for what this place means to Jews—why that is the case—we had little sense of it.

Let’s remind ourselves that the early 1990s was not only a time of expanding international contacts; it also saw tremendous changes at the Museum. We revised the number of victims, and we opened communication with organizations in the Jewish world—one could say that we were “pushed” into it. Yet, “pushed” is really not the right word, because we actually wanted those contacts in line with our shifting awareness. We realized how important the site is to all Jews. The first person who really taught us about this sensitivity was Father Professor Chrostowski. He taught us—by “us,” I mean the Museum staff, those in the Educational Department and the guides—why the lack of understanding on our part was a root cause of Polish-Jewish or Christian-Jewish disputes. I think nowadays only a few still remember that the early 1990s saw intense conflicts: for example, the dispute over the Carmelite convent, which was housed in the “Theatergebäude.” There were many other controversies, so to speak—numerous big debates and protests on both the Jewish side and the Polish side. Also, protests followed the revision of the victim numbers: Jews accused the Museum of never stating that 90% of the victims were Jews, whereas Poles felt somewhat disappointed that “only”—and I say “only” in quotation marks—150,000 Poles were deported to the camp. So there was a certain “competition of memory.” You really needed to learn a lot to overcome those conflicts.

And those visits to Israel, along with the exchanges and lengthy dialogues with people there, helped us a great deal. I should add that it was very important that all lectures for the first groups in Israel were delivered in Polish by Polish Jews—historians, religious Jews, nonreligious Jews—which made it much easier. And those early visits lasted three weeks, so they really allowed us to understand many things that weren’t obvious or clear to us.

And from what I hear, those trips turned out to be extremely beneficial. Many people recall those first three-week visits as absolutely unique. Now, I’d like to ask about another factor that helped pave the way for the International Center for Education: the postgraduate studies that emerged around the turn of the 21st century. Would you say a few words about those studies?

The first postgraduate studies were run in partnership with the Pedagogical Academy in Kraków. We’d wanted to launch postgraduate courses for teachers for quite some time. Teachers, after all, were always one of our main target groups—by “our,” I mean the educational department, in which you were already involved by then. We knew that teachers were eager to pursue postgraduate studies, but they needed diplomas, and the Museum is not a university; it never has been, so it doesn’t have the authority to grant such qualifications. We concluded we needed an agreement with a higher education institution. That institution needed to be an equal partner with the Museum. Professor Wacław Długoborski, who for a while worked as a professor at the Pedagogical Academy, also helped us. That agreement was signed, and later on we established a similar agreement with Jagiellonian University. Professor Ziejka was the one to sign the agreement, as was Professor Mach from the Sociology department. This, in turn, was driven by the “Tempus” program, which we carried out in the early ’90s together with the University of Oldenburg, Oxford, Jagiellonian University, and the Museum. It was a very interesting EU program—one of the first—that allowed for a broad exchange of academic staff and students. It lasted three years. Altogether, around 200 students and professors—some from the Museum’s staff—participated, with stays from three months to a year in Oxford or Oldenburg for some of our staff, which also led to greater understanding of other perspectives. It’s not that you must share all the views held by others—that’s impossible—but I felt it was important to know, to be aware of their perspective, that different way of thinking. I know that these journeys were significant for our staff members.

Yes, definitely. I’d also like to add that those postgraduate studies you mentioned really opened doors for both the lecturers and class instructors – meaning, as soon as it was said “studies in Auschwitz,” many doors suddenly opened. It must be said that Professor Bartoszewski was an enormous support. Among the guests at lectures, we had, for instance, Chairman Szewach Weiss. We also had Alex Dancyg as a guest. We had multiple people from the Israeli Embassy or researchers from many Polish universities—the University of Silesia, the University of Warsaw, the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, of course, and the Pedagogical Academy. So indeed, these were absolutely exceptional studies. And thanks to them, I think, to this day we still have in part a huge pool of skilled teachers cooperating with the Auschwitz Museum or with other memorial sites in Poland. That was all just prior to the founding of the Center, since the official founding took place in 2005, and at that “wow” moment—we had no building. How did it feel directing the Center for the next seven years? Were they “fat” years or “lean” years? How do you see it?

They were “fat” years, in spite of everything. Despite lacking adequate space, we never stopped struggling—I can put it like that—with the support of Professor Bartoszewski and the International Auschwitz Council, which at the time still included many survivors. They truly helped us, because back then the government side proposed—once they realized that yes, education was important, yes, an International Center was wanted—but perhaps in Kraków, not at the Museum, not in Oświęcim. And I suspect that without help from people like Professor Bartoszewski or other Council members, or those professors who, as you said, lectured in the postgraduate courses, who also had their own contacts and influences, the notion of creating such a Center in Kraków might well have become reality. Which would have been senseless, I can say plainly—because having those studies here, on this site, was especially meaningful.

If I recall correctly, it wasn’t at all an obstacle for the lecturers or the participants that our lecture halls were rather modestly equipped. Bit by bit, we managed to raise funds, for instance, to modernize the so-called small cinema hall, to set up two lecture rooms—one in Block 23, another in Block 12. But all those spaces were scattered around different parts of the Museum, and the conditions were extremely modest. Nonetheless, we never had trouble with enrolment. In fact, we typically had to limit the number of teacher-participants. And there was never a problem finding instructors. I think we brought in the top Polish lecturers at the time. I’m personally very happy that the program continues. It’s no longer the Pedagogical University—now it’s known as the Pedagogical University of the National Education Commission in Kraków [Cracow] —another institution, other lecturers, yet it still carries on and still attracts applicants. I imagine you have no trouble recruiting for the next edition of postgraduate studies. I’m very glad about that.

Yes, and between 2005 and 2012, there was a huge educational event, that 2007 conference to mark the 60th anniversary of the Museum’s founding. Could you say a few words about it? We didn’t have our own conference spaces, so that conference took place at the neighbouring Dialogue Center. And as I recall, during the conceptual process, you always stood firm on the premise that we had to have the highest possible calibre of researchers, scholars, historians—we couldn’t compromise even slightly. It had to be the best conference possible. And indeed it was, if you look at the list of participants. And we had no real budget for such a massive conference, but we succeeded.

Yes, it was a big event. I think we were even a bit cheeky. I recall that meeting… For the Center, I’ll call it that, yes, by then it was the Center… For the Center, cooperation with academics from Kraków’s universities was important: people like Professor Marek Kucia, Professor Trojański, Dr. Ambrosewicz-Jacobs. They would come here to help us. They were employed, not necessarily full-time, but they worked at the Museum, at the Center. I remember that meeting where we decided: “They have to be the best. But we have no money.” So literally, at the end of our invitation or request, we wrote that we wouldn’t be offering an honorarium—just plane fare. And no one declined. I think while writing that letter, I remember our brainstorming session in your small office; we were highly aware of the magnitude of this site, how important it is.

By the nineties, slowly the authorities had begun to realize the enormous impact that this place has on Poland’s domestic and foreign policy. We always knew about its impact on visitors, but that didn’t matter greatly to those in power. Yet by then, there was a growing awareness of the place’s importance. For our lecturers, that had been obvious from the start. People like Elie Wiesel, for instance, or the Baumans—Professor Bauman and Janina Bauman—truly, some of the most notable individuals. And not only them. We also had a day devoted to survivors, which was incredibly moving. Some spoke spontaneously, others had prepared statements. Even though I had daily contact with “my prisoners,” that event was unforgettable. I’m proud we managed to carry it out. It was a lot of work for all of us, but a tremendous achievement.

I also wholeheartedly agree. I recall that panel called “The Memory of Witnesses,” because we divided the entire conference into three parts: Memory, Awareness, Responsibility. And as part of that conference, we had those separate panels devoted to each theme. In the “Awareness” panel, we saw figures like Marian Turski, or truly wide-ranging representatives from so many organizations. The director of the Holocaust Museum, Sara Bloomfield, was there; Yad Vashem was represented—I remember Richelle Budd Caplan. Already at that time, we had church representatives, also Rabbi Schudrich. And many other people we mostly had only seen in the media before—like Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Laureate. He, too, decided to come and attend that conference. But after all, the Center also makes exhibitions. You have a reputation for being quite firm, known for your steadfast stance…

Not sure if that’s a plus or a minus…

I’d say definitely more plus than minus. It’s an important characteristic, especially in developing and establishing the national exhibitions, because that, too, was a time when new exhibitions were emerging. The 1990s and then the 21st century brought changes to exhibitions that still bore a strong ideological stamp, shifting to the ones now on display. Who was the hardest to deal with?

I wouldn’t say it was “who,” but “what” was most difficult, and that was the big change: the Museum’s influence—decisive influence—on the content and design of these national exhibitions. Essentially, the regulations for preparation of exhibitions were created by us, but approved by the International Auschwitz Council. The Council helped us get through many challenges, and its help was invaluable. States or governments—generally through survivors’ organizations and ministries of culture or other memory-related agencies—resisted. Never before had the Museum in any way signed off on the content and form of a national exhibition. That clause became one of the key items in the new guidelines. They had to accept it. There were also points about maintaining the exhibitions: the Museum provides the rooms for free, but does not pay for things like electricity or cleaning, etc. None of that caused quite so much friction as the clause that “everything must be approved by us.” Sometimes we had difficult conversations because certain organizers wanted to gloss over their own past. One of the new guidelines stated that each exhibition must open with a concise introduction explaining what went on in that country at the time of deportations to Auschwitz—like in Hungary, when the Holocaust was taking place, with only Jewish transports, or in Belgium or France, where the transports were mostly Jewish but also political prisoners.

We can safely say that today none of those exhibitions contain historical falsehoods. They might have errors—no one is error-free—but there’s no deliberate concealment that “everyone knows” is untrue. That even applied to the Russian exhibition and our dispute at the opening, since for Russians, World War II (the “Great Patriotic War,” as they call it) started on June 22, 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. For us, it began in September ’39, including the September 17 invasion of Poland’s eastern regions by the Red Army, and earlier the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. So those were long, tough discussions, but yes, we held firm. We didn’t want half the exhibition to be about those painful topics—like for Belgium, the existence of SS units made up of Belgians—and indeed, nowhere does that overshadow the rest, but it can’t just be left out. In the end, we pulled it off.

You’ve visited the International Center’s headquarters a few times, and I always see such emotion and authentic joy on your face when you step through that door and meet people. How do you see the current Center?

Besides joy and emotion, there’s a little envy. I never got to spend a single day working in that building. But each time, as you say, I’m moved, and I’m proud. Yes, even my little piece of work contributed to creating this place. The project was already laid out while I was still working here. You later tweaked it, but there weren’t major changes. I truly am moved and very happy. I’m thrilled—truly—and I wish you all continued growth and success.

I’m glad, too, that some of the projects which began to be carried out at the Center when I was still working, when I was then director of the Center, are still continuing. Not exactly the same, but those postgraduate courses, or the projects involving prisons—they’re changed, reworked, but still recognized as important. Or the ongoing staff and guide exchanges with Yad Vashem—Polish guides there and Israeli teachers here. Those courses continue; I think only the pandemic interrupted them. In Poland, they’re practically unique as a consistent, year-after-year exchange for so many years. That’s a huge satisfaction and joy.

And I’m delighted by the building’s design. It’s really outstanding: it’s modern, discreet, respectful of this place and of the camp building. I have no critical remarks. As I said, besides my joy and emotion, I do feel a little envy, but a healthy kind. I wish you tremendous growth. And I’m also pleased by the development of new technologies, though as I once told you, I hope artificial intelligence won’t generate a “prisoner” you can chat with, because such attempts—and indeed, actual projects—have been done. But that’s an area I’m uncomfortable with. I’m not from a generation that’s fascinated by that portion of the Center’s growth, though I’m glad you have strong collaborations with top people not just in Poland but worldwide in that domain, since it’s essential. It’s the future. Without those technologies, our ability to reach future generations would be very limited. I have no doubt about your good sense and sensitivity to the place, so it won’t get out of hand.

Thank you very much for those words. In fact, you’ve partly answered the question I wanted to end with: what goals would you set for the Center in the future?

To continue the aims that drove educational work already in 1946–’47. Spreading that sensitivity, teaching about history too, because what didn’t seem necessary for my generation—for we all “knew” who did what to whom—today is not necessarily obvious to the third, fourth, or even fifth postwar generation. That, for one.

Secondly, I think that this education, besides knowledge of history, must focus more than we did in my time on what led to Auschwitz, on these mechanisms that repeat themselves, that one can see today in various places worldwide. That’s at least as important as historical knowledge of who did what to whom here—of the great tragedy that took place in Auschwitz. To really educate for peace, for the future, you have to stay extremely attuned to any attempt by one group to dominate another, to any signs of intolerance that sometimes come dressed in completely different slogans. That sensitivity—or sometimes oversensitivity—needs to be developed more than ever before. With sadness, we all watch what’s going on in the world today; it’s more necessary than before.

Thank you for talking with me.

Thank you very much.