ZAGREB, February 4, 2020 – An exhibition entitled “If I forget you… The Holocaust in Croatia 1941-1945/Final destination Auschwitz” will be staged on Wednesday in the French Pavilion of the Zagreb Student Centre, the building in front of which Jews were rounded up to be deported in railway wagons to the Auschwitz death camp.
The exhibition, running until 21 April, has been organised by the Croatian History Museum on the initiative of the Croatian Ministry of Culture. The exhibition focuses on the sufferings of Jews from Croatia during World War II, with a special emphasis on the fate of Jews deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.
The museum’s director, Matea Brstilo Rešetar, said at a news conference in Zagreb on Tuesday that it was the duty of “this museum, as a national and specialised institution to highlight topics” such as the Holocaust.
“It has been especially challenging to state the exhibition at the authentic venue,” Brstilo Rešetar said, referring to the fact that Jews were first taken in groups to the site of the pavilion to be transported in railway wagons to the Auschwitz camp.
The museum says on its website that for the purpose of the exhibition “destinies of the killed, testimonies of the survivors, and the few preserved original objects from the camp, photographs and documents from various Croatian and international museums and archives, as well as those borrowed from the families of the victims and the Righteous among the Nations, have been divided into four thematic units: Excommunication; Concentration and Liquidation; Auschwitz (Oswiecim) – Death Factory; and, A Sparkle in the Darkness.”
Brstilo Rešetar said that the museum was the right place to address those issues factually and neutrally, free of daily political discourse. She said they had been given support by many, including the co-organiser, the Croatian State Archive.
“We would like to show that the Holocaust did not happen somewhere else, somewhere far away in Europe, but here, in front of our eyes,” said Nataša Mataušić, a Croatian History Museum expert who participated in the organisation of the exhibition.
The director of the Student Centre, Mirko Bošnjak, said that the Centre, which cares for 65,000 students at the University of Zagreb, was the right place at which young people could be reminded of the Holocaust and victims.
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