He received the honour at a ceremony in Warsaw on Thursday from the French ambassador to Poland, Etienne de Poncins. He described Cywiński as “a humanist whose voice matters and is appreciated in France”, adding “Your research and professional career have made you an authority and a point of reference regarding that particularly dark period in our history”.
In his thank-you remarks, Cywiński referred to his words delivered in January 2019, upon receiving the lower rank’s Legion of Honour – Knight’s Class. He proposed at the time to add to the three fundamental values of the Republic: liberty, equality and fraternity, two principles of the Legion: honour and homeland.
“After all these years, I would like to add to these five values of the Republic and the Legion the sixth value – subsidiarity. It is very European and very close to me personally, indicating, as it does, that everything that can be done at a level close to those who are lower down in the hierarchy should be done at that lower level, rather than the higher one”, Cywiński said.
Among those attending the ceremony were the ambassadors of Germany and Japan, the chargé d'affaires of the Ukrainian and Italian Embassies, as well as a representative of the Israeli embassy.
A professional historian, Cywiński is a graduate of the University of Humanities in Strasbourg, France and of the Catholic University of Lublin in eastern Poland. In 2001, he obtained his PhD from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 2006, at the age of 34, he took over as director of the Auschwitz Museum.
In recent years, Cywiński received high state distinctions from the governments of Belgium, Germany, and Greece.
The Auschwitz Museum commemorates all the victims of the Nazi German camp, where some 1 million Jews, 70,000 Poles, 21,000 Sinti and Roma, 14,000 Soviet POWs and 12,000 people of other nationalities and groups were murdered.
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