Auschwitz sees record number of visitors in 2017
PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek
03.01.2018 14:30
Some 2.1 million people visited the site of the former Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz in southern Poland in 2017.
The main gate of the Auschwitz German Nazi camp. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons Attribution 2.5
This is almost 50,000 more than in 2016, the first year when the number of visitors broke two million.
According to a spokesman for the Auschwitz Museum, more than 80 percent of visitors took advantage of the assistance of the museum’s 300 guides and educators who speak almost 20 twenty languages.
Poles accounted for the highest number of visitors in 2017, with half a million.
Some 339,000 British, 183,000 Americans, 115,000 Italians, 101,000 Spaniards, 85,000 Germans, 83,000 Israelis and 74,000 French also visited the museum last year.
The internet played an increasingly important role in the activities of the Auschwitz Museum. The site www.auschwitz.org had over 33 million hits last year.
More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, as well as non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet POWs and people of many other nationalities, perished at Auschwitz during World War Two. (mk/vb)