Visit to Poland, September 2025

From 25 to 28 September, our association undertook a memorial and educational trip to 4 memorial sites in Poland. We had already organized everything in advance, especially the necessary tickets. Without them, we would hardly have had a chance to visit the individual memorials.

We all met in Kahla and started on Thursday, early to Oswiecim. After 7 hours of driving, we reached the city, whose name was renamed Auschwitz in 1939. After checking in at the booked hotel, which surprised us every morning with an excellent breakfast, we had tickets for Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, about 3 km away, for the next day, on September 26 at 9:00 a.m., which was declared part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. A German-speaking guide led us with a lot of empathy through the history of Auschwitz main camp and then through the extensive grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 1.1 million people were murdered in the camp complex from 1940 to 1945. Impressed by the visible and vividly conveyed story, we said goodbye around 4:00 p.m.

The reason for this visit was to familiarize themselves with the history of the site as the largest German extermination camp and how to deal with this history and the commemoration of the victims of National Socialism and to convey to visitors how the building fabric is refurbished and preserved for the future and how all this is documented in the exhibitions. Our questions were answered comprehensively in informative discussions.