Stories of Slovenians from Auschwitz presented at Museum of Contemporary History
Ljubljana, 26 January - The National Museum of Contemporary History will launch an online documentary exhibition by the Maribor Synagogue on Slovenian victims of the Auschwitz death camp at noon today. Visitors of the museum's website will be able to take an online tour of the exhibition led by its author Boris Hajdinjak from the Maribor Synagogue.
Oswiecim, Poland
The Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in present-day Poland.
Photo: Xinhua/STA
File photo
The documentary exhibition "Here death got dead-tired ... ": Slovenian Victims of Auschwitz tells the story of 2,300 people from Slovenia who were taken to Auschwitz. Most of them were Slovenians, but the group also included around 350 Jews, at least 78 Roma and at least one member of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Only about a thousand of them returned home, while the rest died in Auschwitz, which is thus one of the biggest graveyards of Slovenian victims of the Second World War, the museum said.
The exhibition was first set up on 23 January 2020 to commemorate last year's International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation. Now, it will be on display at Slovenia's most important museum dedicated to the history of the 20th century.
The Maribor Synagogue also made a short video to accompany the exhibition as well as the online guided tour. On Wednesday a podcast featuring Hajdinjak will be held and on Thursday he will deliver a lecture to present the stories of some of Auschwitz survivors.
On 27 January, 76 years will have passed since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people died between 1940 and 1945, including a million Jews, the museum said.
One in six of the six million Jews that lost their lives in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz. This is why the date of the Auschwitz liberation has been chosen as the day of the Holocaust remembrance, the museum said.