Holocaust survivors want Poland to arrange more school trips to Auschwitz

The International Auschwitz Committee (IAC), which brings together Holocaust survivors worldwide, has called on the Polish government to financially support excursions by schoolchildren to the memorial at the former Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reports that the number of Polish visitors to Auschwitz has sharply fallen in recent years.

DPA reports that those who survived imprisonment at Auschwitz are disturbed by the decline in visits to the memorial by Polish schools. In a letter addressed to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the IAC criticizes the fact that Poland is one of only a very few countries in Europe that does not support school trips to such memorial sites and calls on Poland to start such a program. 

According to IAC data, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was visited last year by 1.3 million people, 336 000 of whom were Polish. Two years before that the number of Polish visitors was 610 000.

During the Second World War, the complex on the territory of occupied Poland was the Nazis’ biggest extermination camp. At least 1.1 million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered there.