Honorary Consuls

Enrique de Villamor - Spain

Don Álvaro Enrique de Villamor y Soraluce (Spain), business consultant. Founder and President of the Association for the Cultivation of European Traditions and Culture (APTCE). Founder of the European Cultural Route Románico XXI and the Revival Award, which plans and organises educational excursions and historical events in Europe to spread the values associated with a common identity, promoting the community of European nations, their cooperation and development.

Currently, the Revival Award is being implemented in Spain, France and Poland.

Enrique de Villamor has contributed to the establishment of official cooperation between the two towns of Gernika and Oświęcim. For several years now, he has been organising study tours to Poland and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial.

He was decorated with the Medal of Honour “Meritorious for Polish Culture” by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Knight’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by the President of Poland. From July 2021 Honorary Consul of the Republic of Poland in Burgos (Kingdom of Spain).

Maria Zalewska-Glezer, PhD - United States

She scientifically deals with the media and memory. She is the Director of the New York-based Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation. Maria Zalewska is also a research fellow at the University of Southern California’s Faculty of Cinema and Media. Her scientific work focuses on the convergence of new visual technologies, Holocaust memory and media theories. She is also an associate research fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation. Upon receiving her master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Oxford, Maria was one of the first to work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation (2009-2010). Since 2010 she has continued working for the FAB and PMAB as a volunteer.

She conducts classes on Holocaust memory in the digital era, history of propaganda in the media (media history of propaganda), and links between memorial sites and the digital memorial space. She has written repeatedly about the memory of the Holocaust. Her articles were published in Memoria, Digital icons, Spectator. Currently, she is working on translating her doctoral dissertation into a book. The topic of the doctoral dissertation is “The Holocaust: re-analysis of the relationship between the memorial space and Memorials in the digital age”.

In 2018, the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) awarded her a summer doctoral scholarship. In 2017, she completed a research scholarship at the Centre for Genocide Research of the USC Shoah Foundation. As an associate research fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation, she conducted numerous studies on witness testimonies and pre-war Poland. In the years 2015-2020 she worked in the film committee (documentary film category) for Peabody Awards, In 2019, she organised “VisibleEvidence XXVI”. - the largest international conference on documentary films and the media.