After analyzing the history of the recurrence of the expression “polish death camps”, we realized that, what is often seen as a diplomatic scandal, most of the times is just a simple mistake, made out of haste or lack of knowledge, a mistake that later on echoes to the wider public and is repeated as a fact, without further reflection, falsifying the collective memory. If words were hurting us, we needed words to set the record straight. That’s why we decided to address those, whose word choice has the biggest impact on broad audiences – the journalists, designing a useful tool for their everyday work. We created a special plug-in application for the most popular text editors used by journalists - “Remember”. The app works as a spellchecker, highlighting just one mistake – the phrase “polish death camp” or “polish extermination camp” and suggesting the historically correct expression.

We developed the plug-in application for both Mac and PC’s text editors commonly used by the journalists, in 16 languages – all the languages of Auschwitz Museum guides. The government announced its project on Friday 12th February, and when the weekend was over, the application was working flawlessly and was ready to be sent out. We also set up a webpage correctmistakes.auschwitz.org, where the application was available to download for free, allowing the public for the intervention, whenever the mistake was spotted.

In the morning, Tuesday the 16th, Auschwitz Museum sent to journalists of 300 different media outlets around the world the “Remember” application, together with the letter from the director of the Auschwitz Museum, a link to the webpage and the short movie introducing the application, asking the journalists to help us to stop the media from spreading this painful mistake. The reaction was immediate and overwhelming.

Starting from February the 16th we got a truly massive support form the global media: over 200 different media outlets from BBC news and The Independent, to The Heertz and The Hindu responded to our call and wrote about the app, generating 67.000.000 media impressions globally and starting unprecedented conversation about this erroneous expression with 35.000.000 social media impressions and 19.600.000 Twitter accounts reached. All organic.

The response was so overwhelming, that the Polish government decided to make the application a new diplomatic tool to be used for interventions made by Polish Embassies around the world, commissioning the development of the application in additional 10 languages. The first successful interventions of Polish Embassies, supported by individual readers prompting the use of the application (CBC Vancouver, De Standaard, The Independent, Bergamo Post), let us believe that this tool will eventually prevent this mistake from recurring.