‘The biggest task is to combat indifference’: Auschwitz Museum turns visitors’ eyes to current events

Director wants visit to former Nazi concentration camp to spark reflection on silence of bystanders'

Piotr Cywiski has spent a lot of time pondering a question that has exercised historians, philosophers and politicians ever since the end of the second world war. What lessons should we draw from one of the darkest pages in human history, the organised mass killing at Auschwitz?

A 49-year-old Polish historian, Cywiski has been director of the Auschwitz Museum since 2006. His office is housed in a former hospital and pharmacy built for the camp's SS guards, and his windows look out over a crematorium and gas chamber.