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Museum for adults. The New Exhibition in the Silent Heroes Memorial Center in Berlin
Zofia Wóycicka
z.woycicka@is.uw.edu.pl Biohistorian, assistant professor at the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Warsaw, where she runs the NCN OPUS22 grant entitled "Help provided to Jews during World War II and the process of shaping transnational social memory". She studied at the University of Warsaw and the University of Friedrich Schiller in Jena, completed doctoral studies at the School of Social Sciences IFIS PAN. She worked as an educator at the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews (2007–2011) and as a curator at the House of European History in Brussels (2011–2015), then as a researcher at the Historical Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin (2015–2019) and at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw (2019–2022). Her main area of interest is memory studies and museology, with particular emphasis on the ways of presenting the history of the Second World War. The author, among others Broken Mourning books. Polish disputes over the memory of Nazi concentration and extermination camps, 1944–1950 (2009). Among her latest publications is a special issue of "Memory Studies" entitled Mnemonic Wars, co-edited with Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska and Joanna Wawrzyniak. New Constallations (December 2022)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9461-2387
Faculty of Sociology at the University of Warsaw
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 18 (2022), pages: 760-770
Publication date: 2023-03-11
Abstract
The article discusses the permanent exhibition Silent Heroes. Resistance to the Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933–1945 opened at the German Resistance Memorial Centre in Berlin in October 2021. There have already been several other temporary exhibitions showing the issue of the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust in a broader European perspective. The Berlin exhibition, however, is the first permanent museum display of this kind. Moreover, it presents the phenomenon in a much more in-depth and extensive way than previous exhibitions. While relatively simple in terms of design, the exhibition has a very thoughtful and interesting structure. Instead of presenting cases of Jewish rescue country by country, the curators strived to systematize the phenomenon, which allows problematizing and historicizing the topic. By presenting both, Jews and non-Jews as equal protagonists of the events, the exhibition also breaks with the stereotypical divide between passive Jewish victims and active non-Jewish helpers.
Keywords
museums, Righteous among the Nations, rescue of Jews, Holocaust memory, German memory of World War II
References
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Other articles by the same auhtor(s)
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