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Auschwitz Exhibition at Perm-36 Gulag
At the site of the Perm-36 Memorial, the only remaining Gulag site in the Russian Federation, the Pilorama 2009 International Forum was held under the slogan “War and Peace: Man and Imprisonment.” An important part of this year’s meeting was the Russian premiere of the Auschwitz Museum’s new traveling exhibition on the history of the Nazi German concentration camp. The Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs extended financial support to the project.
The Museum director, Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, attended the Pilorama forum at the invitation of the organizers for the second time, and opened the exhibition. “One camp from the whole Gulag system is actually in existence,” he said, “and today it is an important place for the education of future generations. This is Perm-36. There is a museum here, set up by Memorial, the best known center in Russia for the defense of human rights. The Pilorama festival takes place each year. Former prisoners and thousands of young people attend. There are various debates about civic and democratic issues connected with human rights. This year, as part of our cooperation with Memorial and the Perm-36 center, we have brought along a large exhibition about Auschwitz,” said Cywiński.
Addressing the young people who attended the ceremonial opening of the exhibition, the head of the Auschwitz Museum said: “In opening this exhibition, I would like above all to wish one thing to myself and to you, from the depths of my heart: look at it and see the drama of the victims, and see the incomprehensible world of the perpetrators, but also look at this exhibition and see yourselves through it. Think about your everyday passivity towards evil, because all of us are passive towards evil. This, today, is the sense of the remembrance of the victims of Auschwitz, of the Perm-36 camp, and other similar places—if you never look at anything else, stop being passive. This is the source of the phenomenal hope that is the strength of Pilorama and this great festival. That is why it seemed worthwhile to me to bring this exhibition here.”
Another guest at Pilorama was Adam Michnik, who spent 6 years in prisons in communist Poland for his participation in the illegal democratic opposition. “There are moments in your life when you want to be alive,” he said. “Today is such a moment. I never even dreamed that I could be in the Perm District, in this camp, not as a prisoner but instead as a free man, or that I would be here with my dear friend Sergei Adamovich Kovalev, or that he would be here not as a zek, but instead as a guide at the site of the camp.”
Michnik also referred to the complicated history of Polish-Russian relations and the tragic death of Natalia Estemirova. That well-known journalist and Memorial activist was murdered in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in July 2009. Her death cast a shadow over this year’s forum. Michnik observed that “There is the Russia of those who murder and there is the Russia of those who defend such people. I thank you for the latter Russia.”
Tatiana Kursina, executive director of the Russian museum, also spoke about mutual Polish-Russian relations. Referring to cooperation with the Polish institution, she said: “I am very pleased that our guests and partners and, in this year of 2009, our friends from the Auschwitz Museum have come to Pilorma. They have brought along an exhibition of colossal significance both for us and for the citizens of all other countries.” She noted the symbolic meaning of the Polish exhibition. “It is exceptionally important as a proof of our friendship and cooperation,” she said. “The way that the relations between our countries are viewed and described in the Russian media is an interpretation intended to create misunderstandings and divisions between us, while we would prefer to see Poles as our neighbors and friends—simply people we can live with as neighbors. For me, the significance of this exhibition is not so much informative as communicative; it is the tearing down of walls, something about which so much has been said during this year’s Pilorama. It is also the building of bridges, bridges of friendship,” she added.
The musical star of Pilorama 2009 was Yuri Shevchuk, a singer, guitarist, and composer who founded and fronted the legendary group DDT. Musicians from other known Russian groups, OtZvuki Mu, Tsentrum, and Televizor, also played. Also appearing before the inhabitants of the two-day tent city at the entrance to the Gulag site were offstream groups, bards, and theatrical troupes.
Over five thousand people took part in this year’s forum. More young Russians saw the Auschwitz exhibit in two days than the total number of Russian visitors to the Auschwitz site every year.
Pilorama
a festival and discussion forum held at the site of the Perm-36 camp since 2005. It attracts thousands of young Russians each year. During the festival there are discussions by pro-democracy advocates, frequently joined by former political prisoners and dissidents, about human rights, the development of civil society, difficult themes in Soviet history, and the development of democracy. The accompanying events include concerts of rock and alternative music, theatrical performances, films, and poetry readings. The name of the event comes from the Russian name for the sawmill where prisoners labored, fragments of which can still be seen today at site.
Perm-36
was one of the best-known Gulag camps sites in the Soviet Union. The people sent there in the first stage of its existence included Red Army soldiers from German POW and concentration camps who attempted to remain in the West, as well as other people regarded as enemies of the USSR. In the 1970s, the camp became one of the main Centers for the detention of dissidents and defenders of human rights. The last opposition figures left the camp in 1987. Eight years later, the only museum at the site of a former Gulag camp in Russia was opened, the Perm-36 Museum of the History of Political Repression.
Memorial
an association founded in 1989 that conducts historical research and propagates information about the victims of Soviet persecution and the protection of human rights in the Russian Federation and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
Sergei Adamovich Kovalev
79, is a Russian human rights activist and politician who was a Soviet dissident. In 1969, he founded the first Soviet human rights association, the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR. Five years later, he was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” He spent seven years in labor camps, including those in the Perm region.
The “Nazi German Konzentrationslager Auschwitz Death Camp” Traveling Exhibition
The exhibition presents all the most important issues in the history of the Auschwitz camp, as well as the origins of the Nazi movement and the specific elements of the German terror system in occupied Poland. The exhibition has a chronological-thematic arrangement, relying mostly on source and illustrative material from the Auschwitz Museum and also featuring items from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. There are photographs, documents, illegal creative works from the camp, and postwar works by survivor eyewitnesses.
Titles of the display panels:
Origin and aims of German aggression, German occupation policy, the creation of Auschwitz, the beginnings of the camp—the first prisoners, Auschwitz as an instrument of terror against Polish civilians, the development of the camp, Auschwitz as a concentration camp and a center for the mass killing of the Jews, introduction to the Holocaust and German policies towards the Jews from 1933 to 1941, the Holocaust as the final solution of the Jewish question, the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, the mass-killing apparatus, the course of the Holocaust, plunder, the registration of prisoners, the conditions of camp existence, hunger, prisoner slave labor, terror, the punishment system, executions, medical experiments, the women’s camp, the destruction of the Roma (Gypsies), Soviet POWs, the fate of children and young people, the resistance movement in Auschwitz, escapes and mutinies, the revelation of the crime, aid from Oświęcim residents, evacuation—the death march and liberation, and Auschwitz as a Memorial.
