We proudly announce that an exhibition developed by the State Museum at Majdanek is for the first time presented to the audience in the Netherlands. The project entitled “Spaces of the Holocaust: Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór” launches at the Kamp Westerbork Memorial, where all visitors can see an exhibition displayed under the same title.

Spaces of the Holocaust is an exhibition that describes the history of Majdanek, Bełżec, and Sobibór – three German Nazi camps that operated in the Lublin District during World War II. As centres of immediate extermination of Jews, they were a vital part of the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish question.” That history’s largest genocide is today known as the Holocaust.

Although it is the Holocaust topic that dominates in the exhibition’s content – as the dimension that connects the three eponymous sites – its scope goes beyond that aspect. The authors also describe the broad and regional contexts for the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland, the role of Lublin in the German terror policies, as well as the fates of Poles that were imprisoned at Majdanek. Each section devoted to one of the three sites is also extended with a part devoted to the memorials operating in their locations – their development and commemorative activities. Today they all operate under the auspices of the State Museum at Majdanek.

As exhibition curators proclaim in its introduction:

German-occupied Poland and particularly the Lublin region played a vital role in the Nazi plans of exterminating the European Jews. Major extermination, concentration, and labour camps, as well as ghettos established there during World War II set the network for the mass murder that later became known as the Holocaust. As the world’s first post-camp museum created in 1944, the State Museum at Majdanek today encompasses three memorials: Majdanek, Bełżec, and Sobibór. These three sites – interconnected not only formally in the present context, but also historically as extermination camps – constitute a unique Triad of Remembrance, which documents the history of the Nazi crimes, commemorates their victims, and protects the legacy of those sites – Spaces of the Holocaust.

The exhibition has been prepared in the English-German version and will first be displayed in the Netherlands and Germany. We have also prepared a special educational programme based on its contents, which will be used in cooperation with the local schools and partnering institutions. We hope that thanks to this project we will raise awareness about the tragic history of thousands of victims that perished in the Majdanek, Bełżec, and Sobibór camps. We also wish for it to serve as an invitation – especially to the young people – to visit the memorials in the three eponymous sites.

The Spaces of the Holocaust: Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór exhibition is a part of a project developed under the same title as part of the Young People Remember International programme. It is subsidised by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs thanks to the support of the EVZ Foundation.

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Exhibition developed by the State Museum at Majdanek

Concept and curators: Łukasz Mrozik, Magdalena Petruk

Language version: English-German

German translation: LINGWAY s.c.