News
High Attendance Continues at Auschwitz Museum. 600 000 visited the Museum from January to August
About 600 thousand people visited the Museum grounds, buildings, and exhibitions in the first 8 months of 2006, a figure close to that noted in the corresponding period last year.
As in previous years, the largest numbers of visitors come from Poland, the USA, the UK, Italy, Germany, France, and Israel. Museum guides have showed almost 20 thousand groups around the site this year; these groups contained over 270 thousand young people.
"We attributed last year's large increase in visitors to the extensive media coverage of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, the growth of the pilgrimage movement after the death of Pope John Paul II, and the increasingly convenient road and air connections in Poland," said Andrzej Kacorzyk, organizational director of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. "An important impulse this year was the visit by Pope Benedict XVI and the further growth of tourism and low cost air routes in Poland."
Krystyna Oleksy, director of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, thinks that visitor figures in 2006 will be close to those of the previous year, when a million people visited. "Because of the very large increases in visitors that have gone on over the last two years," she said, "we have decided to increase the number of guides at the Museum."
Antoni Stańczyk, director of the Visitor Services Section of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, noted that almost 200 guides, who receive special training in the subject matter and in languages, now show visitors around the grounds and buildings at the site of the camp. "At present," he said, "we are accepting applications for new guides in the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Norwegian, Swedish, Hebrew, Spanish, and Dutch languages."
The Visitor Services Section, part of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, organizes visits to the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, takes reservations from groups, and assigns guides in the following languages: Polish, English, Czech, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, German, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovak, Hungarian, and Italian.
