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The Citizen Betrayed – The Memory of Holocaust Victims from Hungary

The permanent exhibition titled The Citizen Betrayed – The Memory of Holocaust Victims from Hungary opens in Block no. 18 at the Auschwitz I-Main Camp on April 15, 2004. Magyar Balint, Hungarian education minister and Ryszard Mikliński, subsecretary of state of the Polish culture ministry, will attend the ceremonies, which begin at 3:00 PM.

Hungarian TV will broadcast the opening live, with commentary by Istvan Vago, one of the country’s most popular newscasters.

On the Exhibition

The exhibition presents the history of the Hungarian Holocaust in thematic rather than chronological order. Themes differentiated by interpretation and emotion make up the building blocks of the exhibition. As the authors of the scenario write, “The goal of this exhibition is not ‘the experience’ of the horrors of the Holocaust; it appeals to the mind rather than the emotions.” In comparison with authentic realia, the authors go on, the “reality” evoked in an exhibition can only be false.

Absence is another important visual element in the exhibition. The absence of millions of people senselessly destroyed in the death camps is shown through documents and photographs that appear in non-material form—that is, they are projected on the walls.

These assumptions indicate the double world of the exhibition. Today is projected onto yesterday, with the original floor of the building covered by a “hanging” glass-and-steel platform from which it is possible to look “back” at the virtually displayed documents of the past. The thematic groups include the anti-Semitic legislation in Hungary before the German occupation, the ghettos and deportation, Jews from Hungary in Auschwitz, the persecution and extermination of the Hungarian Roma, and the rescue of the victims of Nazism through diplomatic channels.

National Exhibitions in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum:

There are other permanent exhibitions at the site of the Auschwitz I-Main Camp. Some of them were set up at the initiative of former prisoners from various countries, who were associated in the International Auschwitz Committee. The goal was to educate the public about the Nazi occupation in the countries from which deportations were dispatched to Auschwitz, and to depict the fate of the citizens of a given country. The first exhibition of this type opened in 1960, and others followed. By 1999, some of them had been liquidated and others extensively modified.

The following exhibitions are now open:

• “The Martyrdom, Combat, and Destruction of the Jews, 1933-1945”;
• “The Combat and Martyrdom of the Polish People, 1939-1945”;
• “The Destruction of the European Roma” (opened in 2001);
• “The Tragedy of the Slovak Jews” and “Prisoners from Bohemia in Auschwitz Concentration Camp” (both opened in 2002);
• as well as exhibitions prepared by Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, and Yugoslavia.

Work is underway on replacing the French and Dutch national exhibitions.