The former Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau attracted a record 1.43 million visitors in 2012, the museum said on its website. "Auschwitz in the last decade became a clearly fundamental memorial of the whole Europe,” said Piotr Cywinski, the Auschwitz Museum's director. “It reflects the actual meaning of the history of the Shoah and the drama of concentration camps in the history of contemporary Europe and understanding its appearance today. The growing educational dimension of this place indirectly shows us also the challenges that our societies face today."
446,000 visitors came from Poland, followed by Britain (149,000), the United States (97,000), Italy (84,000), Germany (74,000) and Israel (68,000). Some 300 museum educators offer guided tours of the site in 20 languages.
An esitmated 1.3 million people, around 90 percent of them Jewish, were murdered in Auschwitz. It became the most notorious death camp in German-occupied Poland.
