Auschwits - Birkenau – A dark tourism destination

Despite the horrors attached to it, or maybe because of them, dark tourism makes up one of the biggest segments of the travel attractions market. Modern preoccupation with fictitious and nonfictional death appears to be a major factor behind the demand for dark tourism, in addition to human curiosity (Lacanienta et al, 2020).

From darkest to lightest, the graphic below illustrates the various facets of Dark Tourism. It illustrates the distinctions between the various hues, such as how brighter hues are typically intended for amusement, while deeper hues are typically intended for teaching. However, it should be remembered that a Dark Tourism destination's location is not fixed and is subject to alter over time. Although the categories are distinct from one another and have their own set of rules, a Dark Tourism site may also include a variety of hues, which could lead to conflict (Ferdinandus, 2022).

Source: The Dark side of Dark Tourism (Ferdinandus, 2022)

Nazi Germany's racial policies were founded on a particular theory that claimed the superiority of the Aryan race. This ideology provided justification for the eradication, sterilisation, segregation, and imprisonment of many racial groups, including as Jews, Roma, Slavs, and people of colour, who were viewed as "sub-human" and "race defilers". Despite the fact that this racist policy was implemented throughout Germany, concentration camps evolved as the most obvious institutional representations of racism and anti-outgroup sentiment.

Auschwitz Birkenau Museum    Source: Alina Jalba, EF Education First

It is significant to note that the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 explicitly defined who was deemed non-German, helping the Nazi state to designate out-groups more extensively. Citizens of the Reich could only be people of German descent. Removing someone's citizenship makes them an outsider, making it permissible to harass them. Not only were the people who would end up in concentration camps perceived as foreign prisoners of war, Jews, or Roma, but they were also widely seen as non-Germans and hence inferior ethnic groups.These out-group members were isolated, imprisoned, and dehumanised in the camps; their position provided as justification for their cruel treatment, enslavement, mutilation through medical experimentation, and execution. Concentration camps thus came to represent the pinnacle of state-sponsored institutionalised bigotry, racial hierarchy, and outgroup hostility (Homola et al, 2020).

Source: Auschwitz Birkenau museum

After being taken over by the Third Reich in 1939, the Polish city of Oświęcim was renamed Auschwitz(Halbertsma, 2018). Auschwitz has come to represent fear, genocide, and the Shoah on a global scale. In 1940, the German authorities established the Auschwitz Concentration Camp  (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) on Polish territory that they had taken over and seized. Similar to previous concentration camps, Auschwitz was a state facility run by the SS and financed by the state treasury, which received revenue from the work that prisoners were contracted to do for private businesses.

Prisoners in Auschwitz       Source: Alina Jalba, EF Education First

As it carried out this role, Auschwitz also emerged as a crucial component in the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe starting in 1942. On a smaller scale, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp housed and murdered captives belonging to practically every European ethnic group. Auschwitz began as a solitary camp and continued to develop until it reached its maximum size in the summer of 1944, when it was made up of roughly 40 camps and housed 135,000 people.

Using the designation from November 1943 to November 1944, the two main camps were situated in Oświęcim (Auschwitz I-Stammlager) and Brzezinka (Auschwitz II-Birkenau). In addition to housing part of the detainees, the former of these also held the central warehouses, the commandant's office, the camp's primary administrative offices, and the first, or "old," crematorium and gas chamber, which were in use from the autumn of 1941 to the autumn of 1942( Auschwitz- Birkenau museum, n.d.).

Gas chamber and Crematorium, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Source: Alina Jalba, EF Education First

In June 1947, a Polish government bill established the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Part of the historic Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Auschwitz II-Birkenau are where it is situated.The bill was a response to an initiative by a group of survivors of Auschwitz, primarily former political prisoners from Poland.

It reflected the policies and ideologies of the Polish Communist State at the time, which included denouncing fascism and Nazi Germany, elevating the Soviet liberators of the camp, and highlighting the Polish nation's resistance and martyrdom. Therefore, the bill contained no mention of the Holocaust and instead claimed that the Museum was founded as "a memorial to the martyrs of the Polish nation and other nations." It should be emphasised that the 1947 bill's provisions are the reason the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex is currently the best preserved example of a Nazi concentration camp, even though the museum's mission and the meaning the bill placed on the former Nazi camp differ greatly from how it is understood today(Manikowska, 2020).

In addition to being a site of mass murder, Auschwitz is also a museum, a cemetery, a centre for Holocaust memory, an educational institution, a town in southwest Poland, a "must-see" destination for tourists, and a place where difficult moral and identity discussions take place. Despite all of these subtleties, the phrase itself has become widely used as a shorthand for the Holocaust or, more broadly yet, as an illustration of a simple moral choice.Thus, the word obscures a convoluted and challenging past, frequently serving as a linguistic and historical reduction that prioritises its symbolic currency over historical veracity(Pettitt, 2021).

‘’Arbeit Macht Frei’’ ("Work sets free" or "Work makes one free") gate     Source:  www.Auschwitz.org

Tourists statistics

Over 1.67 million people visited the Memorial in 2023. Compared to the prior year, this represents an increase of more than 41%. This represents a slow return to the pre-pandemic situation.

Approximately ninety percent of visitors learned about Auschwitz's past via museum educators. More than 60% of them belonged to organised groupings. At the moment, 324 guides lead tours of the Memorial in 20 different languages (Bartyzel et al, 2023).

Source : Auschwitz Raport(2023)

Less than thirty percent of the guests were from Poland. The United States, Germany, Spain, Czechia, and the United Kingdom are among the other nations whose citizens have visited the museum. A pay-what-you-can option allowed some visitors to choose to financially support the Memorial's work; visit.auschwitz.org accounted for nearly two-thirds of bookings. More than 12% more individuals were going on study visits, which are longer visits combined with extra educational activities. Among the 21,400 competitors, foreigners made up more than half. During these visits, the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust conducted over 930 different types of educational events. In this context, the public's systemic support for planning school field trips to the Memorial is especially important.

              An eight-minute introductory film, filmed by David Conover and made possible by the Lewis Family Foundation, was viewed by over 250,000 individuals before to the start of their travels. There are 16 languages in which the soundtrack is simultaneously available. American actor Mark Hamill provided the English version's voice as a gesture of support for the Museum. The Museum co-organizes numerous projects in different countries that offer opportunities for individuals to learn more about the history of Auschwitz. The largest of these is the "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away" display, which received 180,000 views in 2023 (Bartyzel et al, 2023).

Social media

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, an established memory institution with over 60 years of history uses social media to further its goals. The Museum launched its formal social media presence as one of the first Holocaust memorial organisations. Facebook profile from 2009 and Twitter profile from @AuschwitzMuseum in 2012. The Museum has also been active on Pinterest, Instagram, and Google Arts & Culture in recent years. As an additional way to further the Museum's goal, Paweł Sawicki, a former journalist and press  officer, started and has overseen its social media activities.

The Museum's social media initiatives and postings are making waves not only online but also in worldwide media, where they are frequently covered and discussed,regarded as an authoritative voice on the history of the Holocaust, its education, and the issues related to Holocaust denial.

              In 1979, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum underwent a significant paradigm shift when it was included to the UNESCO World Heritage List as a result of Polish government initiatives.With this designation, the Polish vision of Auschwitz—first and foremost, as a museum-memorial of Polish resistance and martyrdom—acquired a global significance(Manikowska, 2020).

Technological innovation

In June 2023 a novel multimedia tour, available in Polish Sign Language (PJM), Sign Language System (SJM), and International Sign Language (IS), has been developed to accommodate visitors with hearing difficulties during their trips to the Memorial. Live guided tours of the Memorial can now be scheduled online by people anywhere in the world. The undertaking"Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes" was produced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, AppsFlyer, and DISKIN in collaboration with the Museum from December 2023(Bartyzel et al, 2023).

Cultural influence on tourism

Due to the marketing efforts of national tourism organisations like the Polish Tourist Organisation, which promotes the UNESCO-designated Auschwitz-Birkenau site alongside ghetto tours of Warsaw and Krakow, Holocaust heritage sites have become must-see attractions.

These sites have become more well-known as a result of a surge in Holocaust commercialization that started in the late 1990s when the Holocaust gained more attention in theatre, television, fiction, and non-fiction writing. Adolf Eichmann, Oskar Schindler, and Anne Frank are a few of the more identifiable cultural symbols of Holocaust victims that have come to rule these popular cultural contexts. The tourist destinations that have come to represent the Holocaust include Yad Vashem in Israel, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, and, as a result of the Holocaust being exported from Europe, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (Wight, 2020).

Wax figure of Anne Frank   Source: Madame Tussauds in Viena

The debut and critical praise of well-known films like Schindler's List (1993) and Roman Polanski's Academy Award–winning biographical drama The Pianist (2002) corresponded with the rise of "Schindler tours" and an increase in the number of visitors to the 1947-established Auschwitz-Birkenau Visitor Centre, which saw a record-breaking 2,053,000 visitors in 2016 (Auschwitz.org, 2017).

Schindler's List movie poster  Source: www.bing.com

Determining the boundaries of the tourist activity zones is made possible by the degree of tourism management and the analysis of visitor movement that follows. Four categories of tourist space zones—penetration, exploration, assimilation, and colonization—have been defined for the purposes of this study in accordance with Liszewski's tourist space idea. The administrative boundaries of the adjoining village of Brzezinka and the city of Auschwitz encompass the aforementioned zones. An investigation of the situation shows that the Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum's boundaries contain the majority of the visitor penetration space. This museum emphasises Auschwitz's distinct status as a tourist destination in comparison to other Polish cities. Thus, the unique atmosphere of Auschwitz draws more than a million visitors annually. Simultaneously, the 800-year-old city's othe manmade features regrettably continue to be overshadowed by the former concentration camp(Ziernicka-Wojtaszek et al, 2013).

Due to the obscurity and darkness of the Auschwitz site, many "reluctant" tourists have chosen not to visit this specific location. In regard to the boundaries, social learning theories imply that travellers may have been impacted by a variety of news and feature articles that surface in the mass media that talk about death camps(Michelson et al, 2019). Today, Holocaust tourism is a significant industry, supported by an increase in low-cost flight connections connecting various local locations(Wight, 2020).

The influence of Auschwitz on Oświęcim

There are 43,000 people living in the small town of Oświęcim or Auschwitz. Situated beside the banks of the Sola River sits the settlement. Over the past century, Oświęcim has built a rich agricultural tradition. The chemical factory was taken back and given a new name after the war, and it remained one of the biggest employers in the region until production declined. But after the Soviet Union rebuilt the factory using supplies delivered from Germany, it started to employ most people in the town.

The Holocaust has been entirely forgotten. There is no memorial honouring the inmates who perished during the forced labour or during the marches to the factory, nor is there any reference to the fact that Himmler lured IG Farben to Auschwitz in order to take advantage of the abundance of slave labour. Oświęcim believed that the chemical plant held the key to the future. The plant, which employed 12,000 of the 55,000 residents of Oświęcim, grew to become one of Poland's largest makers of synthetic chemicals and was crucial to the development of the local economy. However, when the plant's output started to drop, Oświęcim was doomed to a fate common to most post-industrial villages. Many people in Oświęcim now commute from the town to cities like Kracow for work, while others work in the town's small companies or in agriculture.

The government is working on numerous projects to protect Oświęcim's local history. In 1996, the Oświęcim Cultural Centre was established with financial support from the Municipal Centre of Culture and the Chemical Plant in Auschwitz. The Cultural Centre hosts festivals, concerts, and activities for kids, teens, and adults. In 1998, Oświęcim's efforts to promote global peace led to the Secretary-General of the United Nations bestowing upon her the title of Messenger of Peace – Peace Advocate.

The local community established the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp Victims Memorial Foundation in 1990. The organization's goal is to assist in maintaining, conserving, and preserving the structures, documentation, and archived materials of the former Auschwitz extermination camp. Monetary assistance collaborate with Polish and international groups and organisations that are devoted to fostering the memory of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp victims. One of the main groups devoted to keeping Auschwitz-Birkenau in the town is this foundation.

In Oświęcim, younger people and older people make up less than half of the population. Approximately 60% of the populace is working age. The town's demographics do not place as much attention on families, increasing the town's population, or youngsters. Clubs and organisations do not have a website link, but attempting to attract new clients and collaborating with foreign partners is emphasised. Youths in Oświęcim are subordinated to the labour force and the town's efforts to develop economically (Bracci,n.d).

Conclusions

Located in German-occupied Poland during World War II, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp is one of the most powerful reminders of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the depths of human depravity. Here are a few examples of how it has greatly impacted humanity:

Symbol of Genocide: Auschwitz has come to represent the methodical murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, as well as millions of other people, including Romani people, Poles, Soviet POWs, and others the Nazi regime judged undesirable. Its very word conjures the unspeakable loss and agony of that gloomy era in history.

Mass Murder and Brutality: Approximately 1.1 million people were industrially killed at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp, mostly by gas chambers, forced labour, hunger, and illness. A sobering reminder of the depths of human evil is provided by the enormity of human suffering and the merciless effectiveness of its death apparatus.

Historical Documentation: The Holocaust's atrocities are documented historically through Auschwitz. The physical camp remains, written records, and the experiences of survivors all serve as important sources of information about the atrocities carried out by the Nazis, guaranteeing that future generations would never forget the truth of the Holocaust.

Site of Education and Memorial: Today, Auschwitz-Birkenau is used as a museum and memorial where people can learn about the Holocaust and pay respect to those who perished there. Its preservation as a memorial site emphasises how crucial it is to remember the horrors of the past and to bear witness to them in order to stop catastrophes like this one from happening in the future.

Impact o

Despite the horrors attached to it, or maybe because of them, dark tourism makes up one of the biggest segments of the travel attractions market. Modern preoccupation with fictitious and nonfictional death appears to be a major factor behind the demand for dark tourism, in addition to human curiosity (Lacanienta et al, 2020).

From darkest to lightest, the graphic below illustrates the various facets of Dark Tourism. It illustrates the distinctions between the various hues, such as how brighter hues are typically intended for amusement, while deeper hues are typically intended for teaching. However, it should be remembered that a Dark Tourism destination's location is not fixed and is subject to alter over time. Although the categories are distinct from one another and have their own set of rules, a Dark Tourism site may also include a variety of hues, which could lead to conflict (Ferdinandus, 2022).

Source: The Dark side of Dark Tourism (Ferdinandus, 2022)

Nazi Germany's racial policies were founded on a particular theory that claimed the superiority of the Aryan race. This ideology provided justification for the eradication, sterilisation, segregation, and imprisonment of many racial groups, including as Jews, Roma, Slavs, and people of colour, who were viewed as "sub-human" and "race defilers". Despite the fact that this racist policy was implemented throughout Germany, concentration camps evolved as the most obvious institutional representations of racism and anti-outgroup sentiment.

Auschwitz Birkenau Museum    Source: Alina Jalba, EF Education First

It is significant to note that the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 explicitly defined who was deemed non-German, helping the Nazi state to designate out-groups more extensively. Citizens of the Reich could only be people of German descent. Removing someone's citizenship makes them an outsider, making it permissible to harass them. Not only were the people who would end up in concentration camps perceived as foreign prisoners of war, Jews, or Roma, but they were also widely seen as non-Germans and hence inferior ethnic groups.These out-group members were isolated, imprisoned, and dehumanised in the camps; their position provided as justification for their cruel treatment, enslavement, mutilation through medical experimentation, and execution. Concentration camps thus came to represent the pinnacle of state-sponsored institutionalised bigotry, racial hierarchy, and outgroup hostility (Homola et al, 2020).

Source: Auschwitz Birkenau museum

After being taken over by the Third Reich in 1939, the Polish city of Oświęcim was renamed Auschwitz(Halbertsma, 2018). Auschwitz has come to represent fear, genocide, and the Shoah on a global scale. In 1940, the German authorities established the Auschwitz Concentration Camp  (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz) on Polish territory that they had taken over and seized. Similar to previous concentration camps, Auschwitz was a state facility run by the SS and financed by the state treasury, which received revenue from the work that prisoners were contracted to do for private businesses.

Prisoners in Auschwitz       Source: Alina Jalba, EF Education First

As it carried out this role, Auschwitz also emerged as a crucial component in the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe starting in 1942. On a smaller scale, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp housed and murdered captives belonging to practically every European ethnic group. Auschwitz began as a solitary camp and continued to develop until it reached its maximum size in the summer of 1944, when it was made up of roughly 40 camps and housed 135,000 people.

Using the designation from November 1943 to November 1944, the two main camps were situated in Oświęcim (Auschwitz I-Stammlager) and Brzezinka (Auschwitz II-Birkenau). In addition to housing part of the detainees, the former of these also held the central warehouses, the commandant's office, the camp's primary administrative offices, and the first, or "old," crematorium and gas chamber, which were in use from the autumn of 1941 to the autumn of 1942( Auschwitz- Birkenau museum, n.d.).

Gas chamber and Crematorium, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Source: Alina Jalba, EF Education First

In June 1947, a Polish government bill established the State Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. Part of the historic Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Auschwitz II-Birkenau are where it is situated.The bill was a response to an initiative by a group of survivors of Auschwitz, primarily former political prisoners from Poland.

It reflected the policies and ideologies of the Polish Communist State at the time, which included denouncing fascism and Nazi Germany, elevating the Soviet liberators of the camp, and highlighting the Polish nation's resistance and martyrdom. Therefore, the bill contained no mention of the Holocaust and instead claimed that the Museum was founded as "a memorial to the martyrs of the Polish nation and other nations." It should be emphasised that the 1947 bill's provisions are the reason the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex is currently the best preserved example of a Nazi concentration camp, even though the museum's mission and the meaning the bill placed on the former Nazi camp differ greatly from how it is understood today(Manikowska, 2020).

In addition to being a site of mass murder, Auschwitz is also a museum, a cemetery, a centre for Holocaust memory, an educational institution, a town in southwest Poland, a "must-see" destination for tourists, and a place where difficult moral and identity discussions take place. Despite all of these subtleties, the phrase itself has become widely used as a shorthand for the Holocaust or, more broadly yet, as an illustration of a simple moral choice.Thus, the word obscures a convoluted and challenging past, frequently serving as a linguistic and historical reduction that prioritises its symbolic currency over historical veracity(Pettitt, 2021).

‘’Arbeit Macht Frei’’ ("Work sets free" or

 "Work makes one free") gate     Source:  www.Auschwitz.org

Tourists statistics

Over 1.67 million people visited the Memorial in 2023. Compared to the prior year, this represents an increase of more than 41%. This represents a slow return to the pre-pandemic situation.

Approximately ninety percent of visitors learned about Auschwitz's past via museum educators. More than 60% of them belonged to organised groupings. At the moment, 324 guides lead tours of the Memorial in 20 different languages (Bartyzel et al, 2023).

Source : Auschwitz Raport(2023)

Source : Auschwitz Raport (2023)

Less than thirty percent of the guests were from Poland. The United States, Germany, Spain, Czechia, and the United Kingdom are among the other nations whose citizens have visited the museum. A pay-what-you-can option allowed some visitors to choose to financially support the Memorial's work; visit.auschwitz.org accounted for nearly two-thirds of bookings. More than 12% more individuals were going on study visits, which are longer visits combined with extra educational activities. Among the 21,400 competitors, foreigners made up more than half. During these visits, the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust conducted over 930 different types of educational events. In this context, the public's systemic support for planning school field trips to the Memorial is especially important.

              An eight-minute introductory film, filmed by David Conover and made possible by the Lewis Family Foundation, was viewed by over 250,000 individuals before to the start of their travels. There are 16 languages in which the soundtrack is simultaneously available. American actor Mark Hamill provided the English version's voice as a gesture of support for the Museum. The Museum co-organizes numerous projects in different countries that offer opportunities for individuals to learn more about the history of Auschwitz. The largest of these is the "Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away" display, which received 180,000 views in 2023 (Bartyzel et al, 2023).

Social media

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, an established memory institution with over 60 years of history uses social media to further its goals. The Museum launched its formal social media presence as one of the first Holocaust memorial organisations. Facebook profile from 2009 and Twitter profile from @AuschwitzMuseum in 2012. The Museum has also been active on Pinterest, Instagram, and Google Arts & Culture in recent years. As an additional way to further the Museum's goal, Paweł Sawicki, a former journalist and press  officer, started and has overseen its social media activities.

The Museum's social media initiatives and postings are making waves not only online but also in worldwide media, where they are frequently covered and discussed,regarded as an authoritative voice on the history of the Holocaust, its education, and the issues related to Holocaust denial.

              In 1979, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum underwent a significant paradigm shift when it was included to the UNESCO World Heritage List as a result of Polish government initiatives.With this designation, the Polish vision of Auschwitz—first and foremost, as a museum-memorial of Polish resistance and martyrdom—acquired a global significance(Manikowska, 2020).

Technological innovation

In June 2023 a novel multimedia tour, available in Polish Sign Language (PJM), Sign Language System (SJM), and International Sign Language (IS), has been developed to accommodate visitors with hearing difficulties during their trips to the Memorial. Live guided tours of the Memorial can now be scheduled online by people anywhere in the world. The undertaking"Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes" was produced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, AppsFlyer, and DISKIN in collaboration with the Museum from December 2023(Bartyzel et al, 2023).

Cultural influence on tourism

Due to the marketing efforts of national tourism organisations like the Polish Tourist Organisation, which promotes the UNESCO-designated Auschwitz-Birkenau site alongside ghetto tours of Warsaw and Krakow, Holocaust heritage sites have become must-see attractions.

These sites have become more well-known as a result of a surge in Holocaust commercialization that started in the late 1990s when the Holocaust gained more attention in theatre, television, fiction, and non-fiction writing. Adolf Eichmann, Oskar Schindler, and Anne Frank are a few of the more identifiable cultural symbols of Holocaust victims that have come to rule these popular cultural contexts. The tourist destinations that have come to represent the Holocaust include Yad Vashem in Israel, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, and, as a result of the Holocaust being exported from Europe, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (Wight, 2020).

Wax figure of Anne Frank   Source: Madame Tussauds in Viena

The debut and critical praise of well-known films like Schindler's List (1993) and Roman Polanski's Academy Award–winning biographical drama The Pianist (2002) corresponded with the rise of "Schindler tours" and an increase in the number of visitors to the 1947-established Auschwitz-Birkenau Visitor Centre, which saw a record-breaking 2,053,000 visitors in 2016 (Auschwitz.org, 2017).

Schindler's List movie poster  Source: www.bing.com

Determining the boundaries of the tourist activity zones is made possible by the degree of tourism management and the analysis of visitor movement that follows. Four categories of tourist space zones—penetration, exploration, assimilation, and colonization—have been defined for the purposes of this study in accordance with Liszewski's tourist space idea. The administrative boundaries of the adjoining village of Brzezinka and the city of Auschwitz encompass the aforementioned zones. An investigation of the situation shows that the Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum's boundaries contain the majority of the visitor penetration space. This museum emphasises Auschwitz's distinct status as a tourist destination in comparison to other Polish cities. Thus, the unique atmosphere of Auschwitz draws more than a million visitors annually. Simultaneously, the 800-year-old city's othe manmade features regrettably continue to be overshadowed by the former concentration camp(Ziernicka-Wojtaszek et al, 2013).

Due to the obscurity and darkness of the Auschwitz site, many "reluctant" tourists have chosen not to visit this specific location. In regard to the boundaries, social learning theories imply that travellers may have been impacted by a variety of news and feature articles that surface in the mass media that talk about death camps(Michelson et al, 2019). Today, Holocaust tourism is a significant industry, supported by an increase in low-cost flight connections connecting various local locations(Wight, 2020).

The influence of Auschwitz on Oświęcim

There are 43,000 people living in the small town of Oświęcim or Auschwitz. Situated beside the banks of the Sola River sits the settlement. Over the past century, Oświęcim has built a rich agricultural tradition. The chemical factory was taken back and given a new name after the war, and it remained one of the biggest employers in the region until production declined. But after the Soviet Union rebuilt the factory using supplies delivered from Germany, it started to employ most people in the town.

The Holocaust has been entirely forgotten. There is no memorial honouring the inmates who perished during the forced labour or during the marches to the factory, nor is there any reference to the fact that Himmler lured IG Farben to Auschwitz in order to take advantage of the abundance of slave labour. Oświęcim believed that the chemical plant held the key to the future. The plant, which employed 12,000 of the 55,000 residents of Oświęcim, grew to become one of Poland's largest makers of synthetic chemicals and was crucial to the development of the local economy. However, when the plant's output started to drop, Oświęcim was doomed to a fate common to most post-industrial villages. Many people in Oświęcim now commute from the town to cities like Kracow for work, while others work in the town's small companies or in agriculture.

The government is working on numerous projects to protect Oświęcim's local history. In 1996, the Oświęcim Cultural Centre was established with financial support from the Municipal Centre of Culture and the Chemical Plant in Auschwitz. The Cultural Centre hosts festivals, concerts, and activities for kids, teens, and adults. In 1998, Oświęcim's efforts to promote global peace led to the Secretary-General of the United Nations bestowing upon her the title of Messenger of Peace – Peace Advocate.

The local community established the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp Victims Memorial Foundation in 1990. The organization's goal is to assist in maintaining, conserving, and preserving the structures, documentation, and archived materials of the former Auschwitz extermination camp. Monetary assistance collaborate with Polish and international groups and organisations that are devoted to fostering the memory of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp victims. One of the main groups devoted to keeping Auschwitz-Birkenau in the town is this foundation.

In Oświęcim, younger people and older people make up less than half of the population. Approximately 60% of the populace is working age. The town's demographics do not place as much attention on families, increasing the town's population, or youngsters. Clubs and organisations do not have a website link, but attempting to attract new clients and collaborating with foreign partners is emphasised. Youths in Oświęcim are subordinated to the labour force and the town's efforts to develop economically (Bracci,n.d).

Conclusions

Located in German-occupied Poland during World War II, the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp is one of the most powerful reminders of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the depths of human depravity. Here are a few examples of how it has greatly impacted humanity:

Symbol of Genocide: Auschwitz has come to represent the methodical murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, as well as millions of other people, including Romani people, Poles, Soviet POWs, and others the Nazi regime judged undesirable. Its very word conjures the unspeakable loss and agony of that gloomy era in history.

Historical Documentation: The Holocaust's atrocities are documented historically through Auschwitz. The physical camp remains, written records, and the experiences of survivors all serve as important sources of information about the atrocities carried out by the Nazis, guaranteeing that future generations would never forget the truth of the Holocaust.

Site of Education and Memorial: Today, Auschwitz-Birkenau is used as a museum and memorial where people can learn about the Holocaust and pay respect to those who perished there. Its preservation as a memorial site emphasises how crucial it is to remember the horrors of the past and to bear witness to them in order to stop catastrophes like this one from happening in the future.

Impact on International Law and Human Rights: Following World War II, the horrors carried out at Auschwitz and other concentration camps greatly influenced the development of international law and human rights standards. The Nuremberg Trials, for example, laid the  foundation for the creation of international criminal law and human rights accords by establishing the legal principle that people can be held accountable for crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes.

As a powerful reminder of the negative effects of unbridled hatred, prejudice, and violence as well as the ongoing significance of justice, education, and remembrance in preserving human dignity and averting atrocities, Auschwitz has had a profound and multifaceted impact on humanity (OpenAI, 2023).