News
Memory is the key to planning our future. Auschwitz Memorial Report 2022.
English-Polish report summarizing the year 2022 at the Auschwitz Museum and Memorial was published. In his introduction, Director Piotr M. A. Cywiński wrote: "Today we can all see and better understand how much we need memory, which is the key to planning our future".
"Russia’s invasion of sovereign and independent Ukraine flagrantly violated the international guarantees granted to the state. The Kremlin’s rhetoric and aggression unequivocally ended the post-war era in Europe, part of the world order resulting from the experience of the Second World War," one read in the introduction.
"This makes it imperative to have stable, inviolable reference points to redefine common spaces of security, peace and democracy. One such absolute point of reference is still the evident and tragic experience of Auschwitz," wrote Piotr Cywiński.
96 pages of this publication include the information on the most important events which took place last year at the Museum, the analysis of attendance of the Memorial, which was last year visited by over 1.2 million people.
"On one hand, this indicates a normalisation of the post-pandemic situation; on the other hand, it still represents only about half the number of visitors before the COVID-19-related lockdowns," one reads.
It is important that Almost 90 per cent of visitors learned about the history of Auschwitz with a Museum educator. Currently, 332 guides give tours of the Memorial in 20 languages.
Although overall attendance did not return to pre-pandemic levels, the number of participants in study visits—an extended form of visiting with additional educational activities—increased by almost 20 per cent compared to 2019.
The pandemic experience resulted in a project to make live guided tours available via the Internet. This is a unique and innovative concept based on an app built from scratch, developed through a joint venture between the Auschwitz Museum, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, and the Israeli companies AppsFlyer and Diskin. Video contact with a guide located in the historical space of the former camp will be provided by infrastructure specially built for this purpose by the company Orange. Work on the platform and application has been ongoing for over a year. The first visitors can take advantage of this new tour mode in 2023.
A special place in the report has been devoted to the last year’s 75th anniversary of creation of the Museum.
"These 75 years constitute, above all, the history of increasing awareness, development, and consolidation of the memory of the victims of the German Nazi camp Auschwitz. It is a history that has been discovered, researched, explored and disseminated with the development of documentary research and the emergence of ever-new testimonies. It is a history that has also repeatedly had to be defended against various distortions, falsifications, revisionism, and denial," one reads
Other subjects treated in the publication are conservation works conducted at the Memorial Site, new publications, new exhibitions and exhibitions which are being developed as well as new items in Museum Archives and Collections, development of infrastructure and directions of scientific works.
"The primary task in 2022 was editorial work on the new five-volume edition of the revised Auschwitz Chronicle. This greatly expanded and updated version of the chronicle, originally published more than three decades ago, will form the foundation of our knowledge of the camp’s history and operation," one reads.
Financial statement and the list of donors who supported the Museum constitute another crucial element. A part of the report is information about activities of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation in the USA that among other things support financially preservation of the authenticity of the Memorial.
The texts are accompanied by photographs presenting the most important events at the Memorial Site together with the reproductions of artefacts and archival documents.
The report is published a day before the 78th anniversary of the liberation of German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz.