News
More than a Million Visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Website
Virtual Visitors Top Museum Attendance.
The Beginnings
Over a million people have visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum website. The beginning came in 1998 with the idea of providing virtual access to the Auschwitz site. The website went online in March 1999, at first only in a Polish-language version.
Five years later, there are Polish, English, and German versions of the virtual Auschwitz Museum, which is ranked first on Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, and other search engines.
Number of Visitors
Visitor tallies are rising constantly. In 2003, they topped 350,000, from all over the world, mostly from outside Poland. Among non-virtual visitors during the same period, the largest group, almost 200,000, was from Poland (see here for exact statistics).
Content
The www.auschwitz.org website enables visitors from all over the world to contact the Museum and learn about the history of Auschwitz. They have access to the names of almost 70,000 victims from the “Death Books,” and can purchase Museum publications and learn about the most important events at the Museum.
For people planning visits, there is practical information on travel, prices, local accommodations, and weather forecasts. The services of Museum guides can be reserved online.
Production
The Museum funds the site from its own modest budget, with the help of people of good will from all over. Last February, True Data Technology of California donated a new internet server. Diana Matut translates German texts on a voluntary basis. A volunteer from the USA is preparing professional panoramic photographs of the most important places at the Auschwitz site. The French Consulate in Cracow is going to offer free help in setting up a French-language version. We are truly grateful for all such contributions.
Plans
The website is constantly expanding, but much remains to be done. We will soon add an internal search engine to make it possible to find interesting information quickly, as well as a site map to make it easier to navigate.
Visitors will not immediately notice the transfer of site contents to MySQL data bases, but this will make technical service more efficient. We plan updates in the near future to add victims’ names as found in the Museum archives and specialist publications to the data base. This will make it easier for interested visitors to locate them.
There are other interesting projects in the pipeline, but these depend on financing and staff resources. One of the most interesting is an online version of Danuta Czech’s Auschwitz Chronicle
User Feedback
E-mail to the Museum makes it clear how needed the website is. Aside from advice and suggestions, most messages express gratitude for the site. In saying this, we are not blowing our own horn. We realize that improvements remain a continual necessity.
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Young pilot from the UK writes:I have just come across the your website in relation to the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. I was gripped by the 'tour' that you have given to these places and having visited Auschwiz myself, found myself reliving the experiences I had felt before.
Recently I have taken my wife to visit Dachau near to München, Germany and although some people may think of it as a strange place to take a new wife on your honeymoon, we both enjoyed the visit (if enjoyed is the correct word) and understand that it was one that we had to do to learn from the past and to pay our respects.
I still cannot believe the things I have seen at both Auschwitz and Dachau but the things and lessons learned that I can remember should and will be passed onto any future people willing to listen.
Once again I must congratulate you on your website. It is very informative and respectful and I shall be recommending the site to my friends. - Asia from Poland writes: My name is Asia and I am 15. Last year I was on a school trip to Auschwitz concentration camp. To tell the truth, I found the whole experience shocking and depressing. Since then I have often thought about the people who were murdered, humiliated, and so deceitfully tortured there. Because I cannot get that visit out of my mind, I have spent the last year gathering information about those camps and looking for documentary films about them… Now I have found your interesting, excellent website…
- Grzegorz from the USA reflected that he …would like first of all to thank you for having an English version, which makes it possible for me to tell people in the USA about Auschwitz—among the 30 people in my class at school, only one had heard about Auschwitz. Tomorrow, I will show it to another class, since their teacher put them to sleep when talking about it. I won’t let that happen...
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Heike from Germany wrote: My name is Heike and I’m 16 and come from Germany. I found your website when searching for material for a project on Auschwitz. Since I’m also interested in this subject in my free time, I was very happy to find the Museum’s own website. I have been to the Museum three times, and the things that happened there [during the war] were shocking. In some way I feel myself to be responsible for what the Germans did there, even though I wasn’t even born yet! I think the Museum should exist for a long time to come so that no one will ever be able to say that no such place existed…
Nothing like that should ever be allowed to happen again. I wish you success in your work.
