06 November 2006
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the best-known symbol of the Holocaust, now has a new director. Piotr Cywinski was appointed director in September, replacing Jerzy Wroblewski, who had led the museum for 16 years. One week on the job and fresh from a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Cywinski told JTA that the Auschwitz museum was in desperate need of a makeover. "I want to renew the main exhibition, which is about 50 years old. It's time to speak differently about this history," said Cywinski, 34, who is active in Polish-Jewish dialogue and who previously was a member of the Auschwitz International Council . He emphasized that any revamping would be done in consultation with international organizations and other Jewish museums. "The exhibitions need to be more attractive to visitors and more educational," he said. "Considering the exhibitions were developed during the height of Stalinism, they are excellent. But there are some themes that are not developed, like the history of anti-Semitism in Europe before the Shoah and the role scientists played in implementing the Nazi genocide." The Nazis murdered an estimated 1.1 million people at Auschwitz. Some 90 percent of the victims were Jewish. The former Nazi death camp was made into a state museum in 1947 and was named a United Nations World Heritage site in 1979. The museum attracted one million visitors from 106 countries last year, the largest number since the 1970s.
