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ERA – European Resistance Archive. International Memorial Trip to Auschwitz
From February 27th to March 4th, the yearly memory trip organized by the Italian history institute “Istoreco” to Krakow and Auschwitz-Birkenau took place the ninth time with 430 participants.
Istoreco works on contemporary social history. The research of the history of fascism, occupation and partisan struggle in northern Italy belongs to the main focus points. It works within a wide network of historical and educational organisations, including a well established cooperation with the local political institutions.
Every year, Istoreco goes to memory places like Auschwitz or Berlin with 300-500 Italian high school-students for an intense visit. The students have gone through a thorough phase of preparation at home, basing on own research, visits of historical places and conferences with eyewitnesses. The preparation is guided by teachers, historians and memory workers, who all participate in the trip themselves. The memory trip is only possible due to the fact that private sponsors and local authorities of the district of Reggio Emilia, Italy carry one third of the total costs.
This year, not only Italian students came to Poland, but also an international team of the ERA-project took part with 80 people. ERA (European Resistance Archive) is a project funded by the European Union and is realized on an international scale integrating Poland, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, France and Germany. The aim of ERA is to generate an online-archive of the history of the resistance movements fighting in Europe against fascism and occupation during the Second World War. Core of the archive are interviews of eyewitnesses which were realized by young people participating in the project. ERA will be an open platform offering information as well as the possibility of publishing own interviews on the topic. It is hoped to grow in future and gain in quality by public interest and participation.
But apart from the interviews, the main work consisted of intense historical research guided by historians and memory workers. The memory trip to Krakow and Auschwitz was an important point in the agenda of ERA for the young people to meet each other, as the main part of their work was done in the home countries.
So for the first time, young people from the participating six European countries met each other during the memory trip and widened the range of the memory trip to an international scale.
The program of the tour was divided alongside the interests of the single groups and was organized on parallel measures – it included visiting the city of Krakow under various aspects: the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, the former Ghetto and Schindler´s factory were visited considering the history of these places connected to the German occupation, the persecution and extermination of the Jewish population. Contemporary history was underlined by going to the city centre to understand post-war history in Poland.
For three days, the group spent their time in Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau. Besides being guided through both of the camps, a commemoration was organized with Hendryk Mandelbaum, one of the last survivors of the “Sonderkommandos”, having had to work directly in the gas chambers of the Nazis. Henryk Mandelbaum gave the ERA group the honour to visit several places in Birkenau together where he had been forced to work and gave testimony to the terrible happenings there. Also, a conference with Mr. Swiebocki was organized, on which he lectured on the resistance in the Auschwitz death camps. Everybody taking part in the memory trip was heavily moved and many discussions and conservations took place between the young people having mixed internationally on high terms.
The Italian students at home are now realizing work shops, in which their experiences of the memory trip are being transformed into a variety of expressions: film-clips, art, texts and theatre pieces are being produced to be presented to a wide public on the 25th of April, being the Italian date of liberation of fascism. The intention is to share their experiences with the local population but also to contribute in the important process of keeping memory alive and vivid.
