One of reconstructed barracks at the Holocaust Museum in Sereď. (source: TASR)
The Holocaust museum in Sereď (Trnava Region) will receive a subsidy of €850,000 from the government’s reserve through the Culture Ministry. The cabinet approved the allocation on January 31. The subsidy will be used to complete reconstruction work and an exhibition that will display how the workshops were equipped and prisoners were accommodated in the Sereď labour and concentration camp. There should also be an exhibition focused on the persecutions and labour camps in Slovakia. The opening of the completed Holocaust Museum and Educational Centre is planned for January 26, 2019.
The Museum of Jewish Culture welcomes the support for completing the museum in Sereď.
“The aim is to show life [in the concentration camp] in full so that all those who say how good it was in Sereď and what a good life was to be had in the labour camps in Slovakia realise that this is denying the Holocaust,” said Pavol Mešťan, director of the Museum of Jewish Culture and the originator of the reconstruction of the camp in Sereď, as cited by the SITA newswire.
The Holocaust Museum is part of the Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava which, in turn, is part of the Slovak National Museum. It is located in the former barracks of the labour and concentration camp. Over 10,000 Jews were deported from this site to the death camps between 1942 and 1944. The museum was ceremonially opened in January 2016.
Three of the museum’s buildings have undergone reconstruction, with permanent exhibitions being placed in two of them. Each exhibition is dedicated to a specific issue. The first focuses on the settlement of the so-called Jewish issue in Slovakia between 1938-1945. The second is dedicated to murdered Slovak Jews, chiefly mapping out Nazi concentration camps where they were deported. The last exhibition focuses on people who rescued Jews during WWII and have been given the honour of Righteous Among the Nations .
The museum also organises educational activities. Over 34,000 people have visited the exhibitions since the museum opened and over 18,000 pupils and students from all over Slovakia have attended its educational programmes.
