Exhibition "Homecoming" Automatic translate

Within the framework of the project “Memory Bridge”, an exhibition “Homecoming” is opening in the Perm Gallery. This is a story about Soviet prisoners of war from the Molotov region who died during the Great Patriotic War in the camps of Lower Saxony, the fate of their families and descendants, who keep the memory of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. The exposition is based on the memoirs of survivors, copies of archival documents, photographs from family albums and memorial museums. The main idea of ​​the exhibition: the war destroys everything, and it should never be repeated.

The exhibition "Homecoming" is the first event of the project "Memory Bridge", aimed at finding materials about the fate of Soviet prisoners of war and forced workers who found themselves in Lower Saxony during the Great Patriotic War.

More than seven decades have passed since the end of the war, but there are still families who don’t know anything about the fate of their relatives — many who went to the front were considered missing for a long time. For many years in the Soviet Union, the topic of prisoners of war and forced laborers was classified as state secrets. A turning point in relation to this topic occurred during the period of perestroika and the first post-perestroika years. Researchers have gained access to a number of archival documents, including foreign ones.

The goal of the initiators of the “Memory Bridge” project is to return the names of Soviet prisoners of war and hijacked to forced labor, whose personal fate has not yet been documented, and thereby give descendants the opportunity to honor their memory.

The search work of the Memory Bridge project is part of a joint Russian-German project for the search and digitization of archival materials “Soviet and German prisoners of war and internees”, a statement on which was made on June 22, 2016 by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “We want to localize, systematize and make available archival materials in order to bring to a logical conclusion the search for information about the fate of the maximum number of people in both countries,” the ministers said in a statement. The Foreign Ministers of the Russian Federation and the Federal Republic of Germany also called on employees of Russian and German specialized departments, archives, scientists and experts to closely cooperate in the implementation of the project.

In two years of exploratory work on the Memory Bridge project, official and family archival documents were found for nearly 1,500 people. Based on these documents, the site mostpamyati.ru was created and the exhibition “Homecoming” was prepared.

The exhibition “Homecoming” tells about Soviet prisoners of war from the Molotov region who died in the camps of Lower Saxony, the fate of their families and their descendants. The exposition presents the memories of survivors, copies of archival documents, photographs from family albums and memorial museums. The exhibition connects the tragically broken lives of soldiers with the stories of their families and the places where they lived before the war. The exposition shows that, despite the past years, relatives remember their ancestors. Now the grandchildren and great-grandchildren keep photographs of those whom they have never seen, they already recall family stories of those who did not return home. For the first time we can see the faces of these people who lived in one of the most tragic eras of modern history.

The exhibition emphasizes the main idea of ​​the project “Memory Bridge”: the war destroys everything, and it should never be repeated

The Memory Bridge is a joint project of the Goethe Institute in Moscow, the public organization Immortal Regiment. Perm ”, which helps descendants to learn about the fate of relatives of the war veterans, and the historian Karl-Heinz Tsissov (Lower Saxony), in the past - deputy head of the Open-Air Museum in Cloppenburg, the initiator of similar studies in his region.

The exhibition "Homecoming" in the Perm Gallery will be open for visitors from May 8 to June 23, 2019. Further it will be shown in several cities of the Perm Territory.

The project is supported by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.