The site of former Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau recorded its highest number of visitors in its 65-year history last year, attracting 1.43 million global visitors, triple the figures of the previous decade. Poland, which was controversially chosen as the co-host of 2012’s World Cup football tournament alongside Ukraine, was the source of the largest group of last year’s visitors with 446,000, with other significant numbers of visits coming from Britain, the US, Germany and Israel, amongst others.
Players from the German, Italian, Dutch and British national football teams made high-profile visits to the site of the notorious Nazi concentration camp on their arrival in Poland ahead of the start of the tournament in June, as they sought to draw raise the profile of the football community’s own constant fight to combat prejudice.
British Football Association (FA) Chairman David Bernstein said of the British team’s official visit: “There are so many lessons to be learnt and understood, and we believe football can lay its part in encouraging society to speak out against intolerance in all its forms.”
The head of French Jewish umbrella organisation the CRIF, Richard Prasquier, meanwhile declared himself “shocked” by his country’s failure to follow in the footsteps of other high-profile national teams in taking in a tour of Auschwitz.
“If you consider big-name footballers as role models for our youth, as representatives of the widespread ignorance in spite of our country’s reported work in trying to combat it and of the absolute necessity in fighting misconceptions, which are a plague on our society, a visit to Auschwitz could have led to valuable dialogue in wider society on the nature of anti-Semitism,” he raged.
In a statement revealing the record figures, Auschwitz site director Piotr Cywinski described the former camp as a “fundamental memorial” for all of Europe. Visitor figures to the memorial site have steadily risen year on year since Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004, which increased ease of access to the region by air travel.
Some 1.3 million people, including 1.1 million Jews from across Nazi-occupied Europe, died in Auschwitz between 1940 and its liberation by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
Auschwitz was set up in a former Polish army base by the Nazis shortly after they invaded Poland in 1939 and was initially used to detain and kill Poles seen as a pool of resistance to their occupation. It was gradually expanded to Birkenau and became the hub for the Holocaust.
The site was turned into a Polish state-funded memorial and museum after the war and has continued to undergo preservation works in the interim years in order to maintain the site in as close a condition as possible to its 1945 liberation state.