News
Volunteers To Collect Accounts by Former Auschwitz Prisoners
Bielsko Biała, April 11 (PAP-Polish Press Agency). About 70 volunteers are taking part in an Oral History project under the auspices of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The goal is to collect the greatest possible number of accounts by former Auschwitz prisoners, MCEAH information section head Jacek Lech told a press conference on Tuesday.
The volunteers responded to an appeal from the Center. MCEAH organizational chief Andrzej Kacorzyk said that the response exceeded expectations. “Doctoral students and recent graduates in history, journalism, and political science have come forward,” he added.
Lech said that the volunteers will receive training from Auschwitz Museum specialists in early June, and then start collecting the accounts. Historians will supervise the work. The goal is to collect more details, including facts about their lives before and after the war, from former prisoners who have already made statements for the archives.
If any former prisoners turn up who have not given any previous accounts, they will be interviewed by a historian from the Museum staff.
Lech said that the program will continue through the spring of 2008, and that he expects at least 300 accounts to be collected each year.
All the material will be added to the archives in the future and indexed by subject matter. It is also possible that some of the material will appear on the Museum website.
“The accounts, recorded on video, would be a testament to that generation,” added Bartosz Bartyzel of the MCEAH information section. “They will supplement the existing accounts in the Auschwitz Museum archives and serve as an important element in museum lessons, as well as a fresh attempt at understanding the mechanisms of the totalitarian enslavement and dehumanization of the world during the war.”
Museum deputy director Krystyna Oleksy said that the archives contain several thousand written accounts by former prisoners. There are about 1,200 other accounts on deposit at Polish Radio Katowice.
The MCEAH was founded by former prisoners on January 27, 2005, during the ceremonies commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The Polish minister of culture formally enacted it in late May of the same year. The goal of the Center is, above all, to convey the memory of Auschwitz and the Holocaust to the younger generation. (PAP)
