"They Risked Their Lives ..." Exhibition Opens in Vienna

Mateusz Szczepaniak, 16 November 2016
Our exhibition "They Risked Their Lives - Poles Who Saved Jews During the Holocaust” has visited another city.  It has now been on display for several days at the local Polish Institute in Vienna. The exhibition was jointly opened by Konstanty Gebert and Institute Director Wojciech Więckowski. In the meantime, the exhibition is also on display once again in the USA - thanks to the Polish Consulate in Chicago, it is now on show at the Holocaust Museum in St. Louis.

The exhibition was created in 2013 by the POLIN Museum in partnership with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. To date, the exhibition has had numerous showings abroad including in Paris, Madrid, Moscow, Vilnius, Tallinn, Düsseldorf, Melbourne, Havana and Hawai. It has been translated into five languages – English, Spanish, German, Russian and Lithuanian

Speakers at the opening ceremony, held at Vienna's Polish Institute in 17th November 2015, was Konstanty Gebert, journalist, columnist, founder of the "Midrasz" monthly, and Wojciech Więckowski, Institute Director. The German language version of the exhibition was created at the initiative of the Polish Institute in Düsseldorf and this is its first presentation in Austria. This is one of a series of exhibitions presented by the Institute throughout 2014 and 2015. Other exhibitions have featured Jan Karski (World War II Polish diplomat), the Warsaw Uprising and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The exhibition tells the story of the Righteous Among the Nations - Poles who risked their lives, and the lives of their families, to help persecuted Jews. The exhibition shows the fate of the rescuers and the rescued in the historical context of occupied Poland. It explains the scale of help provided and what motived the Righteous to do what they did.

The exhibition was prepared in the basis of testimonies collected from the Righteous themselves and from those who were rescued. These were collected via the "Polish Righteous – Restoring Forgotten Memory" internet project of the POLIN Museum.

The exhibition will remain on display at the Polish Institute in Vienna until 6th January 2016.