Due to COVID-19, the opening date has been postponed. It will be announced as soon as more information is available.
Due to COVID-19, the opening date has been postponed. It will be announced as soon as more information is available.
Due to COVID-19, the opening date has been postponed. It will be announced as soon as more information is available.
Here you can view a movie about their digital exhibition which is about forced migrations among Sámis
The Museum of the Middle Pomerania in Slupsk opened the temporary exhibition”We met in Slupsk. Settlers’ stories” on 15th of July 2021.
The core of the exhibition are the video-recordings with the interviews with three generations of people who call Slupsk their hometown: people who settled here after 1945, the first generation born in the town after World War II and young people whom we qualify in “Identity on The Line” project as the third generation.
Nowadays, it was hard to find people who are Germans born in Stolp in Pommern and who stayed here when the town became Slupsk (some of them are deceased, some of them had left decades after the war), so we used previous material from one of the interviews with German-born citizens, who had been gather by senior curator Dorota Hanowska during her long studies on the subject. Nevertheless, we didn’t want to ignore the stories of the pre-war inhabitants, whose experiences and forced migration are so similar to stories told to us by the Polish people.
Dorota Hanowska also prepared a film in which she made a compilation of stories, because the video-recordings, even made shorter and edited in post-production, are a huge and long testimony of the participants of a very specific migration process, when the whole population was forced to leave and was replaced by another, by the people who had lost their homes in territories annexed by the Soviet Union, or just were convinced to settle in Pomerania by the propaganda of the new, socialist authorities.
The quotes from the recordings are also a background for the objects and photos brought by the interviewees which are shown in the exhibition. They are a proof of the fact, that not only the war, but also the life after 1945 was hard and poor. This is especially touching when you realise that the first and second generation of the interviewees were young children at the time.
However, their memories are not only traumatic, but they also show a lot of hope and even bits of happiness they experienced – for example – in exile in Siberia. Most of the interviewees wanted to forget about the war and live on. Yet there are not many secrets in Polish stories, apparently families had shared the past with the next generations. The main obstacle to be open and frank was ‘the troubles’ you could encounter from the socialist authorities – which back in time were severe and even life-threating. These were stories about being exiled to Siberia or removed from their own homes by the Soviets.
Today’s children don’t know much about their families’ stories from 1940’s and 1950’s and quite often are not aware of the historical events that influenced their ancestor’s life. That’s why there is a special part of the exhibition and an educational program for families and (during the schoolyear) also for schools, that should encourage young people to seek for their own family background and understand the feelings and emotions of people in situation of migration. Hopefully, it would also bring understanding for today’s migrant.
Photos about the exhibition are under the Photo menu.
Due to COVID-19, the opening date has been postponed. It will be announced as soon as more information is available.
Due to COVID-19, the opening date has been postponed. It will be announced as soon as more information is available.
Due to COVID-19, the opening date has been postponed. It will be announced as soon as more information is available.
