with ingrown barbed wire – living symbols of the tragic past.
The exposition displayed in Sobibór constitutes a perfect example of the modern way of thinking about the exhibitions. Minimalistic space promotes concentration and gathers artifacts, information boards and multimedia displays that make it possible for visitors to interact with documentaries and carry out their own search through an extensive repository. They build complex museum narrative, combining the facts enabling us to understand the past and the artifacts which bring closer the fate of its main characters, and thanks to unique presentation and interior arrangement, can be remembered deeply. The language of this narrative is open: it does not impose any preconceived interpretation on the visitor, but creates the opportunity to understand and experience it in their own way. On one hand, it constitutes a thorough and multi-threaded comment to displayed objects, while on the other, it explains in a simple and clear way the issues of utmost importance connected with the Shoah. In this way, the visitor receives a complete exhibition, in which things and words combine to form a palimpsest of meanings open to individual sensitivity and empathy.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, constituting a comprehensive complementation of displayed objects, which makes it possible for all those interested in the subject to extend their knowledge on the extermination camp in Sobibór. Its subsequent chapters develop sixteen theme-related panels around which the exhibition has been constructed. The catalogue presents vast iconography of the camp: the reproductions of historical photographs and documents, maps and photos of the most interesting artifacts and views. The catalogue and the exposition complement one another and in this way, readers can study on their own what they have already seen at the Museum.
Key task of the new museum in Sobibór consists in preserving the memory and broadening the knowledge about the extermination of European Jews by the Third Reich regime. Documenting and commemorating the victims of the “Reinhardt” action carried out in the years 1942-1943 within the General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region is of particular importance for the site. Various methods of representing past events applied with this idea in mind by the authors of the exhibition and the Museum, combined with the care for preserving historical background and authenticity, may contribute to gradual broadening of the consciousness and horizons of European memory of the Holocaust.