This Is Democracy Episode 244: Auschwitz-Birkenau

[00:00:22] Jeremi: Welcome to our new episode of this is democracy.

This week. We are very fortunate to have the opportunity to talk about a very difficult. But absolutely vital topic for understanding the history of society, history of modern Western society in particular, and, uh, the past and future of democracy. Uh, this is the topic of the Holocaust, and in particular we’re going to talk about Auschwitz Birkenau, one of the most notorious and deadly of the many concentration and extermination camps.

Uh, that were built by the Nazi regime during World War II. We are joined today, uh, by Paweł Sawicki, who is the Press and Public Relations Officer at Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum in Poland. Uh, we had the chance to meet him this summer when we paid a visit to Auschwitz Birkenau. And I will say that the, uh, 45 hours we spent with Paweł are 45 hours I think we will never, never forget.

Uh, Paweł, thank you for joining us

[00:01:23] Pawel: today. Hello and Thank you very much for this invitation.

[00:01:27] Jeremi: Before we turn to our discussion, uh, with Pavel Sovisky, we have, of course, our, uh, scene setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem?

[00:01:35] Zachary: Neue Synagoge, Oranienburger Straße

[00:01:39] Jeremi: Okay. You’re just showing off your German these days, aren’t you? What does that title mean? It is

[00:01:44] Zachary: the new synagogue in Berlin. It was the last one. Uh, to be built or they, maybe not the last one, but it was the center of the Berlin Jewish community before the war. It’s this very grand Moorish building. It’s really a symbol of, of the success of Jews in the Berlin Jewish community.

And it’s also a, today it houses a small Jewish museum. Most of the building is still in ruins, um, that I visited soon after we, we left Poland.

[00:02:14] Jeremi: Okay. Let’s hear your poem.

[00:02:16] Zachary: The doors we built opened onto the street. The dome we built lifted all eyes to the heavens, where in the red steel airplanes we built.

They rehearsed for us the Great Destruction. Two thousand of us killed ourselves so as not to be burnt to ash, and sent up into the clouds like soot. For then there were no brave policemen left to call the fire brigades and beg for water. They say, after the war, the trees grew. Straight through the windows, out of the wet cinders.

Two thousand blades of grass surround the pond where we, where our mothers lie. No, the graves are unmarked, the landscape too indifferent. The people, hardly less so, and out of our thousand, thousand lives, little more than a fading memory. A single pond, a marsh, a puddle there in the fields of grass. 2023.

And the sanctuary of our prayers still lies in ruins, a field of gravel, an altar of black marble, an open air epitaph looming at the windows where they rehearse the same routine and practice their same poetic hate, where purple flowers bloom in clods of soil by the artificial pond where they walk their dogs.

Or, perhaps, in the same windows are candles lit again, and if you can lean back, you see the fires on the horizon, smothered before us into a wonderful sunset.

[00:04:07] Jeremi: That’s a very strong visual you’re creating with that poem, Zachary. What is your poem about?

[00:04:12] Zachary: My poem is about how the scars not just of war, but of genocide in Europe remain in our lives and how they, they shape the world that we see today and how so many of those wounds, even though the participants, uh, and the victims have, have, many have, have unfortunately passed away or been murdered, uh, there remain, uh, deep wounds, you know, we have not addressed, and, and deep scars, and that as much as we like to think, uh, that, that the hate that, that sparked, uh, this, this horrific violence, um, has disappeared.

It remains in ways that are uncomfortable to recognize. Yes,

[00:04:57] Jeremi: but we must recognize. Yes, yes, yes. Pavel, I think that’s a perfect theme to turn to you on. You spend so much of your time thinking about these issues. Why do you think it’s so important to study the Holocaust and to visit sites like Auschwitz Birkenau?

[00:05:13] Pawel: Visit to the authentic sites. Is of course important on many levels and this is a history lesson, of course, but there is always something different when you come to a place where a history happens. There is this, um, level of, uh, Of something beyond just facts and history. It is very often metaphysical journey that, uh, you are standing in the place where history happened.

And the Auschwitz Memorial is a place where, where indeed people come and people can walk through the same streets, see the buildings where this tragedy happened, can look at the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria and the authenticity of the, of the side that survived, even with all the destruction and a lot of the destruction were made by the perpetrators who tried to erase the evidence of their crimes.

Um, but still you can understand what happened at almost every spot. And when you link it with the historical photographs, with the testimonies of survivors, the, the site affects a person on, on many levels. And, um, if you ask why it is important to study it, um, Holocaust and the human tragedy of Auschwitz is important.

Or to us as humanity, I believe, and without this belief, I don’t think I would be able to spend almost 16 years working at the at the memorial because we touched. There’s something. That is fundamental about humanity. Unfortunately, very negative things, something that was already brought up here. The ideology, the scar, it is all there.

And Auschwitz is a warning and from my perspective as an educator, but also our perspective as the community. Memorial that preserves the sites and educate people about the tragic story of of all the victims commemorating the victims. It is essential to go beyond just the facts and statistics because of course we we need to learn the facts.

We need to learn the dates. Auschwitz starts in spring of 1940 as a concentration camp targeting mainly. Polish intelligentsia, and it’s, it’s simply an element of the terror system that Nazi Germany, uh, launches in occupied Poland. But then the camp goes through all these stages and transformations targeting many different groups of people and, uh, like Soviets, prisoners of war, for example, and Roman Sinti.

And then in spring of 1942, step by step, it, uh, transforms itself in a, in a simil simultaneously working extermination center against the, uh, basically Jewish. Uh, people from all around occupied Europe and most of the victims were murdered in gas chambers and then the camp is liberated by the Soviet soldiers in January 1945.

So we have this chronology that is very complex and complicated. But, uh, What, what I think is, uh, kind of above all this is first of all, to learn why it happened, why, uh, Germany as a country transported itself and why people in Germany accepted, uh, the Nazi party and the policy and how the election system allowed the Nazis to grasp power and then a totalitarian state is born, how a totalitarian state can the Um, can enforce the ideology on numerous groups of society in, uh, something that seemed to be, uh, uh, you know, after all the problems of the great war, but a democratic state and how democracy slowly loses to a totalitarian regime.

And, and finally how this ideology starts. targeting, uh, many different groups of people. And of course, anti Semitism is the core of this ideology. So there, there is a level of remembers awareness, but something that is the most challenging, uh, for us all is what it means for us today. Why Auschwitz is a warning?

Uh, why should we look at the story and understand that while This huge tragedy happened in Auschwitz and we can see the ruins of the gas chambers and we can see how people were murdered. We need to understand while we walk through this space that gas chambers were only at the end of the long process of creating ideology.

put turning ideology into words, turning these words into a political party program. And finally, this ideology takes over the power of the state. And, uh, we, uh, look at those ruins at the uh, Auschwitz memorial. And something that is very challenging to us is to understand that these ideologies didn’t disappear.

We’re not looking at the remains of Auschwitz as an some kind of anthropological surprise that we are surprised when we stand and face, uh, the ruins of the gas chambers or, or a place of the selection that, uh, you know, something happened eight years ago. And we are so surprised because nothing like this can happen in the world we live today.

But yeah. But unfortunately, all those ideologies that led to that catastrophe in human story and also, unfortunately, other genocides, because Holocaust wasn’t the first and wasn’t the last genocide in our story, that all those ideologies exist. today. And we are in a position, many of us are in the position of being bystanders to, uh, these ideologies in our countries, in the world with all this modern communication that we have when it becomes almost, um, you know, at the very second when things happen, we start getting information, which.

There is a difference, of course, when we look at the 1940s and the start of the Second World War and what is our human moral responsibility in the world, um, when we are bystanders of this, because as today, people ask this question about bystanders during the Holocaust, uh, countries that saw what was happening in, uh, uh, Uh, in Europe, controlled by Nazi Germany, occupied by Nazi Germany.

And sometimes people ask question, why more was not done? Why the camps weren’t bombed and ask all those questions. We need to understand that. When, if we ask that question today, someone else will ask another question about us today. What did we do in, uh, 2023 when we witnessed, uh, the results of such hateful ideologies?

Probably why didn’t we do more? So the story of Auschwitz is a warning and is a call for. Something that we call this moral responsibility for another human being as bystanders today.

[00:12:25] Jeremi: Paweł, one of the, um, things that struck me so, so strongly when, when we walked through, um, the, the museum and the camp and when we, we discussed this, uh, in Poland a month ago, uh, was Uh, how little resistance there was not just the bystanders, those who watched this occur, uh, but those who participated actively, um, thousands of soldiers, um, and thousands of doctors and others.

And, um, you made the point that, that in most cases, People didn’t just follow orders. They, they, they participated actively. Um, those who were in positions to, uh, to do that. Um, what do we, what do we take from that? Because I think as historians, sometimes we, we give a lot of emphasis to the resistance, to the dissidents.

And we all like to think that we would be a dissident, that we would, if we were sent to run a camp like this by our own government, that we would say no. Um, or if we were a doctor, that we would refuse to be the person choosing who lives and who dies. But, but clearly there were very few examples of that.

So how do you react to that very disturbing

[00:13:34] Pawel: historical evidence? It is a very complex question, because of course, uh, asking ourselves what would we do in that situation is maybe very tempting, but also Uh, it is some kind of a trap because understanding complexities of the world in the past and of the world that is outside our, um, intellectual scope, because we, we, of course, talk about hypothetical information is very challenging.

But here, what I think is the crucial element to understand when we talk about Auschwitz, when we talk about Nazi Germany at that time, but also when we talk about any other. Uh, cases off genocide in our human story is that genocide didn’t happen without the structure of the state and the power of the state and the trust in the states that we usually have is something that we need to take into consideration that perpetrators of the genocide.

First of all, belief in the ideology, but this ideology is taken over by the state and becomes a policy of the state and it is wild. Probably it would be much easier to resist to occupiers to some guerrillas who force us to do so. It is probably much more difficult to build this type of moral resistance to your own country.

And this is what happened in Germany. And yeah. Another thing we need to remember is that it didn’t start with killing, uh, this ideology Sliced, you know, slice after slice took over people’s freedom took over institutions took over The way people thought took over media took over Actually, every aspect of social life in Nazi Germany, the, the term that is sometimes used when we talk about the social history of Nazi Germany is Gleichheitung, which means every aspect of the functioning of the of social life had to be, had to become part of the political life that everything became a Nazi fight.

When there, when there was a knitting organization association, it became a Nazi association. When people were collecting stamps, it became a Nazi collecting stamp association, but the same happened with universities. The same happened with research institute with legal professions and the Nazi regime did everything to step by step.

Take over people’s minds and poison people with this disease, with this poisonous ideology. And this is something we also need to analyze, that, um, it’s maybe… Tempting to say we would resist, but, um, we need to understand that this is a process that lasted very long time. Some people managed to escape before it became genocide.

Um, but, uh, when… Uh, the system already grew to the position of being this, uh, horrible monstrous creature, unfortunately run and created by people, um, that for many, it was too late. And another thing that we also can see when we look at the perpetrators is that Perpetrators very often were responsible for a tiny little element of the entire process of genocide.

And it’s also much easier to rationalize it when the state tells you that this is okay, that the ideology explains to the Jews are not human beings, and we are simply doing the world a favor when we try to get rid of the Jews. But also, very few people are… engage in the last stage of the process in killing.

But there is the whole state apparatus, administration, bureaucracy, rail lines, police, different units, post offices, and so on and so on. The, in this case, responsibility is somehow dissolved and people do not see themselves as perpetrators, but they’re simply doing part of the administrative process that is ordered, that is approved by The state that we trust and and here are the very complex circumstances.

We need to think about not only concentrating on the last stage and relatively a little group of people that pulled the trigger that put Cyclone B into the gas chambers. Of course, the Auschwitz as an institution was a big camp, and in the peak moment, there were over 4, 000 people managing the camp, and these were the SS men, but also not all of those SS were directly responsible for the killing, and this kind of dissolving responsibility connected with the The power of uniforms and one homogeny group, and there were different researchers, historians, and psychologists studying the power of a uniform, the power of your brothers in arms, that you will not fail, even if you do not feel comfortable obeying some of the orders, you will not fail your orders.

Colleagues, your friends who are with you, that there are so many different aspects of social, political, and, uh, but also this kind of, uh, human connections that, um, made, uh, it possible, but in a very long period of time. It, it never happens overnight. I’m sure another

[00:19:10] Zachary: question that you get quite

[00:19:11] Pawel: often from, from visitors and from

[00:19:13] Zachary: school children in particular, I would imagine is, uh, what did the people living near Auschwitz, those who, who must have known what was going on, if not the details, at least the scale of the violence going on at Auschwitz, what did they do?

And how did the process of memory Uh, and, and memorializing the millions who were killed

[00:19:37] Jeremi: at Auschwitz, uh,

[00:19:39] Zachary: begin after the end of the war when there were few victims, uh, left to remember crimes, uh, and when it

[00:19:47] Jeremi: was

[00:19:48] Zachary: left largely on the shoulders of those who remained.

[00:19:51] Jeremi: in the area to remember.

[00:19:53] Pawel: You ask two different and two very complex questions.

First of all, to understand the local context of the creation of Auschwitz, we need to remember that this part of occupied Poland was directly annexed into the Third Reich, and Poland, Germans divided Poland into two parts. One part they annexed, and this really, this indeed became Germany from their point of view, and the second part was the general government, kind of a protectorate colony structure where we Uh, situation was, uh, much different in every regard and generally speaking, the development of Auschwitz gradually destroys the local life because Poles are, uh, expelled, uh, from the town of Auschwitz because the, uh, IG Farben starts building a new factory, uh, near the town.

So, uh, the, uh, apartments are needed, uh, and there is a gradual destruction of this, uh, life over there, but also the creation of Auschwitz means at some point creation of Interessengebiet, the zone of interest, which finally was 40 square kilometers of territory that was surrounded the two main parts of Auschwitz, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau, and several thousand Polish people were brutally expelled from there in a very short time in spring of 1941.

So basically, there are no bystanders. Very close to the camp. There are bystanders outside of this zone of interest. People who have their own, uh, challenges because of the annexation. Their crops are stolen, people are taken to forced labor, uh, and many, many other, uh, difficult things are happening to those people, but they are not imprisoned in a concentration camp.

And, uh, the, the part of the historical process that we study is that people… Are curious and they knew that the camp is near. They could observe from, for example, from their fields, they could observe prisoners working in the fields, few hundred meters away. Of course, they couldn’t enter into this area because there were plaques saying that this is dangerous and they risked their lives.

But they were curious who were those people. At some point during the story of Auschwitz, prisoners were walking from Auschwitz one to the IG Farben building sites through the town. And again, local people could see Themselves. prisoners who were guarded, you couldn’t approach them, but this caused questions.

And we can see that from, from the very beginning of the camp, that there was an attempt of doing something, even in very early stages, uh, in, uh, late 1940, just a few months after the camp was created, local parishes started occupiers, whether it will be possible to, uh, to send Christmas. Um, gifts or packages to the prisoners, because at that time, most of the prisoners were, uh, Poles and most of them were Catholics and actually the, the camp refused the request to organize a mass for Christmas, but they allowed sending packages.

But what, what, what is, uh, very interesting for me as, uh, As an educator, also as a former journal journalist, because I was interested in this topic, I made a small documentary movie where the local people in villages who were living outside of the zone of interest, sometimes a few kilometers away, and they Stude, uh, they face this challenge off of responsibility, and we actually know about over 1200 people.

Sometimes the numbers are that are given around 1500 people in different places near the camp, mainly in villages. So ruler areas, but also in several towns where some of the sapkins were created, some of the coal miners who work in the coal mines, and these were people. Many of them, uh, which again is, uh, important in the context of occupation.

Many of them were, uh, women and girls. Uh, people need to understand that in the annexed territories, men were ordered to work. And so any men between the age of, I think, 16 and 40 something had to work. So, uh, if… Man were walking around during the day. It was suspicious for women. It was much easier, especially for teenage girls.

And this these communities started organizing help for prisoners. And something that was very intriguing when I spoke to those people is that no underground, no resistance came there and said, you, you and you will be responsible to do something. They started organizing themselves, collecting food in villages, and then at night smuggling to the, uh, territory of the camp, of course, leaving some things to bribe the guards and the functionary prisoners, smuggling messages, medicaments, uh, Many escapes wouldn’t be possible without, uh, prisoners who escaped receiving help from the local population.

So, in the, in this context, uh, there is, uh, on one hand, a local tragedy and destruction of life. And when we talk about commemoration today, we are talking about a completely new villages around the, the area, because all those villages during the war were destroyed. Uh, of course, the town of Washington is a little bit different story because the town itself was not destroyed.

But the, the change of people after the war is a, it’s another story that we do not have time to cover, but there was.

[00:25:19] Jeremi: Structural, uh,

[00:25:20] Pawel: help, uh, organized. And again, of course, we can ask the question whether 1, 500 people or 1, 200 people is a lot or not. Many people were afraid, um, some people could be indifferent, but…

those 12 or 1500 people is not five people. And we, we can observe that people out of their own, like feeling of responsibility and moral needs. Many of them didn’t consider to, to be heroes. They simply did what, what was the human reaction at the time. And this is something which is this, if we are trying to study the story of, uh, Okay.

Moral responsibility of bystanders. These are the stories that we need to study because we can see those very often simple, not very, very well educated people who decide to do something and this do something. is important because sometimes when I speak to young people, when we discuss this matter, um, people try to think very, um, kind of very elevated ideas, uh, combating or preventing genocides, things that are very difficult and very, uh, distant to our lives.

You know, when you are a teenager in high school, You do not really think how can you prevent genocide, but this do something means that we need to find our level of responsibility because each of us can do something to another human being. And this is something very, very important. And then when you ask about memory, this is a very interesting process of Uh, on the one hand, shaping the need to create the memorial.

There was a discussion, uh, after the war in Poland, what to do with the site of the former camp. And there were some, and this discussion was a debate among intellectuals, journalists, many different people. Some people said that this place should be ploughed, should be erased, because the evil that took place there was so enormous.

But some survivors stayed at the site of the… Uh, former camp started collecting the documents that the Germans didn’t manage to burn, started collecting objects, um, uh, personal items that, uh, remained from the victims and so on, and they were the, those people behind the idea that something should be done with the site and thanks to them in 1947, which again, in this political context of the story of Europe after the war is a horrible time of Stalinist totalitarianism, not only in Soviet Union, but also in Poland and many other countries in this region, but those people.

Wanted some kind of institution of memory to be created. And then in June, July, 1947, the Auschwitz Memorial is created with all its challenges, ideological twists of the era of the communism. However, the institution… was there and the core of the institution was there. And then when we talk about memory, we need to understand that the memory about Holocaust connected with Auschwitz, also later developed completely independently.

And during the time of the Cold War, visiting the Auschwitz Memorial, either from Israel or from the States or Western Europe was very challenging, but the memory was growing. And the memory grew because of the, also because of the role that Auschwitz. took in the, in this symbolic field of memory of the Holocaust, because Auschwitz was a concentration camp, but at the same time, an extermination center and the concentration camp had many survivors who would talk about extermination.

And, uh, this authenticity of voices could create this memory. And then finally, in 1989, when communists collapsed and the site became accessible, all those memories met at the site and led to many different types of conflicts. But now over 75 years after the memorial was created and over 30 years after the collapse of the communism, we are in a completely different world where building bridges between different memories that are located in Auschwitz is something that.

has been going on for a long time. So we live in a completely different era of memory. As I said, two very complex questions. I tried to give you just the kind of a very, um, a little bit of this, but both of these topics, uh, can be discussed in, uh, you know, in separate, uh, lectures, programs, discussions.

[00:29:53] Jeremi: And, and of course both of these topics have received books addressing them just individually.

And, and Pablo, you’ve given us a really thoughtful and, and informed, very well informed and, uh, and, uh, a sophisticated understanding of these two issues to at least begin to talk about them. I think the question that we, we should close on and the question that probably follows, from everything you’ve said, is what do you think in your 16 years, uh, in this role, what do you think, uh, people are learning, those who come to visit, and what do you think we should learn that we’re not learning?

[00:30:28] Pawel: I do hope that people who visit the memorial, but also meet us in different forms through exhibitions, social media, books, and films. First of all, I do hope that people learn about all those different memories when we talk about Auschwitz and coming to the memorial is very often getting from the level of, of a very abstract symbolic place to the level of the geography of the camp, what existed where, what’s were the connections between the two camps, what things happened in Auschwitz I, in Birkenau, so learning some kind of complexity also on this geographical level, but also factually.

However, I do hope that we can get from this warning when we talk about how People can get motivated to become a perpetrator. What is the power of ideology that people can use this as a warning in our life today to be more aware of the existence of these ideologies, to be more aware that we all have a choice and we can all make a difference.

And you know, when we look at the story of Auschwitz, we can say that symbolically, And not only symbolically, it all started because there was a man who had a motivation that he’s ideology that he coined all the hatred that he started expressing with words. And of course, I’m talking about out of Hitler at some point pushed people to do to do to this horrible crimes.

So individuals can make a difference. And we can see Populism and different ideologies in the words of, uh, politicians in, we saw it in history where we can observe it today. We will observe it in the future, but, uh, trying to understand how this mechanism work. can be something. We can be more immune and we can start understanding where populism starts addressing us and tries to take us over and poison us with this ideology.

But I do hope that one question that will remain in people I meet, for example, at the memorial is this question. If individuals can make a difference, what can I do today to make our world a little bit better place? And what is my responsibility in this world we live in? Because each of us can make a difference, find motivation to simply do something good to another human being.

And with this drops of goods, maybe we can turn it into a river. A sea, an ocean that can make a difference on a more global level. We need to understand that individuals can do something. And it doesn’t have to be something very big and something very distant and something very difficult for us. But we can start small and then other people can join and amazing and great thing can happen.

That’s a beautiful

[00:33:32] Jeremi: and very powerful metaphor. Zachary, you visited Auschwitz and had the the good fortune of being able to walk through with Pavel to learn about it from him. Um, what did you learn? You knew a lot about the topic already. What did you learn that you didn’t know before? I think it’s

[00:33:49] Zachary: very easy as an American to see World War II.

Um, and the defeat of Nazism and, and fascism as a sort of triumphal story. And as Americans, we often focus in that context on Normandy and the D Day landings. Um, but I think being at Auschwitz, not just at Auschwitz, but also, uh, learning about, uh, the effects of the war on, uh, the area of Poland, uh, that Auschwitz is in, shows how devastating Uh, the war was for so many and shows that the center of the war was this sort of senseless murder destruction that, uh, that, that this hateful ideology released, um, and I think it’s worth reflecting, uh, on the, the, the terrible power, uh, and, uh, and scale of murder that occurred, um, and I think it’s important that we, as we think about it.

our own history as Americans, um, but also as Brits or Germans or Poles or, or Russians, or that we think of, we think of the, um, the, this, uh, crime as one of the central stories.

[00:35:09] Jeremi: And I think just building on that, Zachary, and the really wonderful insights from Pavel today, I mean, I think the Holocaust is unique.

We shouldn’t believe or misuse the term to say that There are holocausts elsewhere, but there are elements of the holocaust and Pavel has been so eloquent on this. There are elements of the hate and the ideology that although different, continue to live on. And, um, we have to, I think, use this history.

It’s a very difficult history, but use this history to also help us recognize the elements of it. The echoes of it that we see in our world and ask ourselves hard questions, the questions we’ve talked about here. Are we analyzing these things open, with open eyes? What are we doing? I think as Pavel said, most of us are not in a position, none of us are really in a position to change the world overnight.

But we can all make a difference and we can all ask ourselves if we’re making things better or worse. We do live in a world now with rising anti Semitism in many of our societies, certainly in the United States. Um, by every measure, uh, rising antisemitism and we see, um, extreme violence all around us, not the same as the Holocaust.

But not entirely different, either. Uh, when we visited, uh, Poland this, uh, summer, uh, we were actually quite close to, to Ukraine. Right, Zachary? I mean, and, and there we’re, we’re seeing not a Holocaust, but we’re certainly seeing hatred and genocide, um, before our eyes. And so, uh, we all do have to ask ourselves what, what we can do.

Um, I encourage all of our, all of our listeners, all of you to, to really go and visit Auschwitz Birkenau if you haven’t yet. And if you have, uh, as, as I had before this visit, to visit again, um, because there is so much to learn. And as Pavel said so well, uh, there’s no substitute for seeing it with your own eyes, for walking, walking the platform where the, uh, Jews were.

were taken off the trains, uh, seeing the crematoria, uh, and, and learning the, uh, the process. And we want to encourage everyone to donate, uh, to the museum, uh, as well. Pavel, how, how can, uh, listeners, uh, donate to the

[00:37:18] Pawel: museum? The easiest thing is to, uh, enter our website, uh, Auschwitz. org and find the donate button at the top of the, uh, the page.

So this can be done. Very easily, but what I can also encourage people to do, because, uh, while I do believe that. Everyone should visit the memorial. I know that for many it is very difficult because it’s far. It is a challenge. Right now in the United States people can see the exhibition Auschwitz Not Long Ago, Not Far Away.

It is in Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, but it will… Uh, visit several other, uh, cities in the United States, but the Auschwitz Memorial also provides a lot of information online with the virtual tour, panorama. auschwitz. org, with podcast. auschwitz. org, you can listen to our podcast. We also have online lesson, lesson.

auschwitz. org. Uh, I encourage everyone. to take a look because we try to create those educational materials so that everyone could have a possibility to see and I can already invite you to something that will be launched soon, the online life. Guided tours. Uh, this is the project that we’ve built, uh, was created out of the pandemic experience when the site was in a lockdown and we are now finishing, uh, creating an app and through this app, again, it will not be the same, but it will allow people sitting anywhere in the world to connect life with, uh, one of our educators and being guided life with a possible interaction.

So if you have a chance. Do come and visit, do revisit, but we also use this global technology, uh, online and offline to bring the history of Auschwitz to all those who are interested.

[00:39:11] Jeremi: Absolutely. And, and Pavel, you’re doing pioneering work on this, you and your, and your team. Um, and it’s important for all of us to, um, reach out to understand the story, but also to share it with others.

Uh, to share it with family members, with neighbors. Uh, this is everyone’s history, whether you’re Jewish or not, whether you’re Polish or not. This is everyone’s history. And it’s vital, as I think Pavel has made clear, for all of us to understand the world we’re in today. Uh, Pavel Serwiski, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for all you do to bring this history to millions of people every year.

Thank you, Pavel.

[00:39:45] Pawel: Thank you very, very much. Thank you,

[00:39:47] Jeremi: Zachary, for your moving poem, as always, and your excellent questions. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this week of This Is Democracy.

[00:40:02] Pawel: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode is written and recorded by Harris Koudimi. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

See you next time!