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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Shaun Walker in Oświęcim

‘The biggest task is to combat indifference’: Auschwitz Museum turns visitors’ eyes to current events

Holocaust survivors walk with others through the main gate of the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Holocaust survivors walk with others through the main gate of the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Photograph: Czarek Sokołowski/AP

Piotr Cywiński has spent a lot of time pondering a question that has exercised historians, philosophers and politicians ever since the end of the second world war. What lessons should we draw from one of the darkest pages in human history, the organised mass killing at Auschwitz?

A 49-year-old Polish historian, Cywiński has been director of the Auschwitz Museum since 2006. His office is housed in a former hospital and pharmacy built for the camp’s SS guards, and his windows look out over a crematorium and gas chamber.

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