WATCH THE EVENT RECORDING HERE
Please join us for the evening with
Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński
Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Memorial and Museum and author of
Auschwitz. A Monograph on the Human
In conversation with journalist and author Andrea Pitzer
A Q&A session, book signing and reception will follow the talk.
Thursday, December 1, 2022
6:30 - 6:45 p.m. - Check-in
6:45 p.m. - Start of the event
The Kosciuszko Foundation: 15 E 65th Street, New York, NY 10065
This event has been sponsored by the Bobinski Fund.
The event is free and open to the public. Seats are limited. Registration is required.
Please note that in order to secure maximum attendance, we accept more registrations than the capacity allows. Seats are on a first-come-first-served basis. The event will be recorded, and the recording will be available on the KF YouTube channel.
The book is the first attempt - on a global scale - to delve so deeply into human emotions inside the camp. It is a must-read for those seeking to understand what Auschwitz was all about.
The gathering of materials and work on the publication took almost six years. Piotr Cywiński analyzed over 250 books with memoirs of survivors of the German Nazi Auschwitz camp and extensive hitherto unpublished archival material containing their accounts. On this basis, he presented an in-depth reflection on the condition of humans subjected to the concentration camp process.
The subject of his reflection became the emotions and inner dilemmas of the people incarcerated in the camp and the defense strategies that helped them survive. The diversity of issues he highlighted during conversations with survivors and the analysis of their memories and accounts is striking - said Jadwiga Pinderska-Lech, head of the Museum Publishing House.
The book is divided into more than thirty chapters, each devoted to a separate subject. They include, among others, "Initial Shock," "Solitude," "Death," "Hunger," "Companionship," "Empathy," "Decency," "Struggle and Resistance," "Culture and Science," "Fear," and "Hope." One great asset of the book is the extremely aptly chosen quotations from nearly 450 Auschwitz survivors. MORE
Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński - Historian; Doctor of humanities; Graduate of Marc Bloch University in Strasbourg, the Catholic University of Lublin, and the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Science. Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Co-found and the president of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation. Vice-President of the Warsaw Catholic Intelligentsia Club from 1996-2000 and President from 2000 to 2010. A participant in the Polish-Jewish and Christian-Jewish dialogues, the Ukrainian-Polish dialogue. MORE
Photo Courtesy of Marek Lach
Andrea Pitzer is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, which was named a best history book of 2017 by Smithsonian Magazine. In addition to One Long Night, Pitzer is the author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, named a "best read" of 2013 by Foreign Policy magazine. Andrea has written for The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Outside, GQ, Vox, Slate, and many other publications. MORE
Photo Courtesy of Jennifer Burns
For press inquiries or further information, please contact Ewa Zadworna at ezadworna@thekf.org or 212 734 2130