Exhibition on Poles and Jews in Warsaw during WYD

The outdoor exhibition, a project launched by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, will open at the Adam Mickiewicz monument in Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street in Warsaw's downtown on Thursday.

"The Museum on Wheels exhibition has been prepared in English, specially for guests who will come to Warsaw and Krakow during the forthcoming World Youth Day," PAP has been told by Monika Sadkowska who coordinates the project on behalf of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

On show is a map and a model of a Jewish shtetl, a calendar of a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland, and excerpts of memoirs and interviews. The three-dimensional model of a shtetl presents the most important places of a typical Polish-Jewish town.

"The central point of the exhibition is an interactive map of each town and city visited by the Museum on Wheels. The map describes important places connected with the local Jewish history. But here, in Warsaw, the map will be different from the ones prepared for small towns," Sadkowska said.

The map in Warsaw is linked with a multimedia interactive part of the exhibition - an application titled 'A good address. Stories of the hidden Jews in occupied Warsaw' telling the story of the Righteous Poles saving Jews during the Holocaust. According to historians, some 27,000 Jews could have been hidden in Warsaw during the war.

"We will never find out how many of them survived. The Poles who helped them risked their lives. Poland was the only Nazi-occupied country which imposed the death penalty for saving Jews. This application presents these 'good addresses' - places where Jews were hidden by Warsaw residents and where they survived," Sadkowska added.

There will also be a permanent part of the exhibition concerning Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish, the three coexisting and intertwining languages used by Polish Jews.

By the end of April 2017 the Museum on Wheels will have visited 71 towns in Poland. The project, launched in 2014, has been implemented as part of the Jewish cultural heritage programme thanks to Norwegian and EEA funds.

World Youth Day 2016 will take place in and around Krakow on July 26-31. (PAP)

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