Our Exhibition Opens in El Paso Texas!

Mateusz Szczepaniak, 16 November 2016
Our exhibition "They Risked Their Lives ... Poles Who Saved Jews During the Holocaust" has gone on show again in the United States. This time the venue is The El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center in El Paso, Texas and has been organised by the Polish Consul General in Los Angeles. The exhibition  will remain open until the 31st December 2015.

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.

The Museum venue was funded by Holocaust Survivor Henry Kellen. He, his wife and his eight year old nephew were rescued by a Lithuanian woman who found them a secure hiding place following their escape from the Kovno ghetto. During the HOlocaust, Kellen lost his entire family. He came to the United States in 1946 and settled in El Paso where, in 1994, he established the Holocaust Museum which told of crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during the years 1933-1945. Last year, around 25,000 visited the Museum.W ubiegłym roku placówkę odwiedziło 25 tysiący osób.

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.