FCB Warsaw Creates App Ensuring Auschwitz Is Not Misremembered

Nearly seventy-one years after the liberation of Auschwitz, memories are fading and the misleading term “Polish death camp” is appearing more and more frequently. This inaccurate phrase, repeated by high-profile individuals such as President Obama in 2012, and F.B.I. Director James Comey in 2015, has led to false accusations that the Poles were responsible for Nazi crimes and complicit in the Holocaust.

To ensure that careless words won’t deceive future generations, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and FCB Warsaw created “Remember,” an app that helps journalists and writers avoid the terms “Polish concentration camps” or “Polish death camps” and suggests a historically accurate alternative. 

The app is compatible with Microsoft Office on PCs; on Mac it works across all software using the system dictionary, including TextEdit, Keynote, Outlook and the browser Safari. Currently, it is designed to search for errors in 16 languages, including those spoken by educators at the Auschwitz memorial site. Work is ongoing to include additional languages. 

Since it was discovered that many of these errors come from journalists, specific outreach was done to share the app with journalists around the world, to ensure that tight deadlines don’t reshape the historical accuracy of the atrocities of the Holocaust.