SOBIBÓR – EXHIBITION
AT THE MEMORIAL
AND SITE OF THE CRIME
Aleksandra Skrabek, State Museum at Majdanek
The exhibition is entitled “SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor. German extermination camp 1942-1943” and is presented in a modern museum pavilion, forming part of new interior arrangement of the Sobibór memorial site. Design of the building and its surroundings, referring to land development principles dating back to 1965, was created by: Piotr Michalewicz, Łukasz Mieszkowski, Mateusz Tański and Marcin Urbanek – winners of the international competition for the architectural and artistic concept of the site. Following the vision of the designers, location of the museum building is supposed to direct the attention of visitors onto two places representing particular significance for the history of the camp: the railway ramp, where trains transporting the deportees used to stop, and former prisoners’ camp where the uprising broke out. As emphasized by Tomasz Kranz, Ph.D., exhibition curator and director of the Museum, “design prepared by the architects is supposed to mark in a symbolical way the border between death and freedom won in the fight by some of the prisoners”. Authors of the exposition followed the idea of reading the post-camp image and discovering its traces and meanings as well.
The exhibition presents and brings closer the reality of the functioning of German extermination camp in Sobibór as part of an extensive plan of extermination of Jewish population in Europe occupied by the Third Reich. Sixteen theme-related panels discuss key issues of history of the Shoah – from the assumptions of Nazi racial policy and plans of extermination of the Jews, nicknamed “Einsatz Reinhardt”, through displacement and mass murders, to detailed instructions on the functioning of the camp and the uprising organized on October 14th 1943, being one of the most heroic acts of Jewish resistance during the Second World War.
The aim of the exhibition, resulting from the Museum’s missions, consists in telling current and future generations about the Shoah as well as in commemorating and restoring the subjectivity of thousands – mostly anonymous – victims with the help of specific archaeology of memory. It was achieved by presenting the accounts of former prisoners, quoting the names of victims, places of their origin and presenting photographs of some of them. Nearly a hundred photos and documents reconstruct camp topography, present how the buildings located within its premises looked like, record the nightmare of deportation and transport of Jewish families, present the faces of crime perpetrators and their victims.
The collection of memories, gathered in a meticulous way, is complemented by the objects discovered at the site of the crime during archaeological works. As a result of many years of research, thousands of discoveries were made, including among others fragments of buildings with the foundations of gas chambers. However, the most extensive collection of artifacts consists of items brought to the camp by the deportees and these personal belongings carry the greatest emotional, historical and symbolical value.
In the last days of October, State Museum at Majdanek inaugurated in its branch in Sobibór the long-awaited permanent exhibition documenting the history of German extermination camp in Sobibór, where the SS murdered about 180 thousand Jewish children, women and men.