Individual reflections on Oświęcim and on the International Meeting 2011

Yes, I am Polish. But today I feel more like a world citizen brought up within the Slavic culture. My family history is also not very complicated: one set of grandparents were deported from Belarus to Lower Silesia – hence my upbringing, which I would refer to as “Eastern”. What do I do? I graduated, two degrees, and currently I travel and get to know new people – different nationalities, religions, places of birth, and residence. My interests are centered around the wider view of the East as well as Jewish culture. For these two reasons I came to Oświęcim for a seminar on Memory and Commemoration in the Age of Web 2.0.




For me, Oświęcim is a town in Małopolska, 60 km away from Cracow, that has 40 thousand inhabitants. It might seem that there is nothing special about it, but I decided to take five days off and come to visit it. I came to meet with youth from different countries and to talk to them about history. The most important thing for me was to learn experience from their first visit to Poland, to Oświęcim, and the Auschwitz Memorial Site.

Katarzyna Gasińska

(This text was previously published in the February 2011 edition of "Oś", the monthly magazine of the Auschwitz State Memorial and Museum.)