Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has celebrated the 71st anniversary of the camp’s liberation by creating an innovative way to correct collective memory errors surrounding the second world war.
With an app called Remember, the museum hopes to remind people that there were no Polish death camps, only German Nazi concentration and extermination camps, by eliminating the expressions “Polish Death Camps” or “Polish Extermination Camps” in future and past pieces of writing.
The app works like a spell checker to detect any use of the phrases and underline them. To encourage its removal, alternative suggestions are offered including “German Nazi concentration and extermination camp” or “German camp in occupied Poland”.
The museum is even encouraging those who don’t write to help the effort by sending a link to the app to authors who use the incorrect phrase as a way of ensuring they will not make the same mistake twice.
Operating as an add-on, the app is free to download with mac users able to access it through it on TextEdit, Keynote, Outlook, Mail application and the Safari browser.
PC users can use it on Microsoft Office Word.
