27. January 2025
Expo Window
Expo Window: Messages from Auschwitz
by Jewish Museum Vienna & National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism
On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. At that point in time, roughly 7,000 surviving prisoners were still there. Most of whom were abandoned in the sickbay barracks, while others were in hiding as they waited for the camp’s liberation. The SS had already deserted the camp by then and fled towards the West. In the months leading up to the liberation, tens of thousands of prisoners were evacuated and brought to concentration camps in the West in what were called “death marches.” Many prisoners were sent to Mauthausen in Upper Austria.
© National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism
Over 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz and its satellite camps: racially persecuted Jews, Roma and Sinti, Poles, political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, people who were categorized by the Nazis as “asocial” and “criminals,” and Russian prisoners of war. Among those deported to Auschwitz were more than 17,000 Austrians, only a few of whom survived. Additionally, there were 163 identified members of the camp guards and SS from Austria; some of whom held central positions within the camp.
In 1947 the former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was declared a museum and erected as a memorial site. In the following years, the “victim states” were given the opportunity to create their own exhibitions to commemorate their citizens who perished here in a former prison block located at the “central camp” (Auschwitz I). In the years following the end of World War II, Austria still saw itself as the first victim of Nazism and opened its own exhibition in 1978. The show was conceived largely in part by Austrian survivors of Auschwitz.
Around the late 1980s, Austria began to increasingly acknowledge its role in and responsibility for Nazism. A plan for a conceptual redesign of the exhibition was made in 2014 by the Austrian Federal Government. In October 2021, the new Austrian exhibition Far Removed. Austria and Auschwitz opened on the ground floor of Block 17.
Through the stories of perpetrators and victims, the Austrian exhibition connects Austria with Auschwitz. It shows how their biographies began in Austria, met a brutal, murderous end in Auschwitz, or then led back to Austria. The exhibition, however, also separates both places: Objects that come from Austria are virtually featured in the exhibition, while all original objects on display come from the concentration and death camp Auschwitz. A digital guest book is centrally placed within the exhibition, in which visitors can write or draw their thoughts.
© National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism
Following the logic of the exhibition, these thoughts are part of the show, but have more to do with Austrian commemoration culture rather than with Auschwitz itself. Therefore, they belong and should be brought to Austria. For this reason, the written or drawn reflections gradually disappear from the screen of the digital guest book and are sent to Austria, where they are then collected by the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism.
The entries then reappear on the exhibition homepage www.auschwitz.at, at the House of Austrian History, and, in commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, in the Expo Window of the Jewish Museum Vienna. As if by invisible hand, we see the messages from the Auschwitz memorial written and drawn by visitors from across the globe.
The content of the written and drawn entries vary greatly: topoi of commemoration culture such as “Never Forget” appear alongside personal thoughts and banal comments. All together they are a mirror of society and its relationship with the Holocaust.
Statistics on the Published Entries (as of January 23, 2025):
By the end of 2024, including January 2025, the National Fund approved over 3,000 entries for publishing. The entries are written in over thirty languages:
- Arabic
- Basque
- Belarussian
- Chinese
- Danish
- German
- English
- Estonian
- Flemish
- French
- Georgian
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Korean
- Croatian
- Lithuanian
- Dutch
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romani
- Romanian
- Russian
- Swedish
- Slovak
- Spanish
- Czech
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
Most of which are written in German (979) and English (733).
The entries also take on various forms. There are 2,094 written comments, 499 drawings, and 517 entries that are a combination text and illustrations.
© National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism
