Ethnographic exhibition of the Memorial Centre Lipa Remembers
| EUROM
addition, the space contains a small replica of the permanent exhibition
run in Lipa’s first memorial museum, which was founded at the
initiative of the local community and inaugurated in the 1960s.
Going up to the first floor, the atmosphere changes completely.
We enter the War Room, a dark, unsettling space that begins narrating
the account of the events that took place in Lipa on 30 April 1944. In the
middle of the room, there is a large table onto which the geographical
region of which Lipa forms part is projected. The animated projection
with a voiceover recounts the events that preceded and caused the
tragedy.
The second floor is certainly the most complex of all. It contains
the memorial of the massacre committed by Nazi soldiers in Lipa on
30 April 1944. At the entrance, there hangs the Order Nº 9 issued by
the man who led the operation, General Kubler. The crimes against
humanity committed there were carried out under this order.
Hanging on the left-hand wall of the large room, the photographs
bear witness to the murders committed by the Nazis, alongside some
chilling figures: in just a few hours, 296 people were killed, mostly
women, children and the elderly. The Nazi soldiers took photographs
to demonstrate that they had completed their mission and also to use
as propaganda. The images were preserved thanks to Suzana Maraž, a
worker in the photography studio to which the Nazis took their films to
be developed, who decided to make copies and keep them until after the
end of the Second World War, as evidence of the atrocities committed
in Lipa. However, the photographs not only show the murders, but also
how the Nazis stole anything of value. The last of the snapshots shows
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3