What was lost: The new Siberia Museum in Białystok is staging a hotel café as a memorial room.
Image: Agnieszka Sadowska / Agencja Wyborcza
Poland is dedicating itself to its history with new exhibition halls and memorials: a “Museum of Remembrance of Siberia” was opened in Białystok, and a “Mausoleum of the Martyrdom of Polish Villages” in Michniów.
M.so chapters of Polish history have not yet been written. ”This could be the unwritten motto on which many museums have been founded in Poland recently. Many subjects were taboo under the dictatorship. In the fifteen years that followed, during the most difficult time of upheaval, there was hardly any money for culture; the priorities were different. But then the economic “shock” reforms finally bore fruit, joining the EU in 2004 brought new funds, the country took hold and ventured back into history. Museums have been built since then. Large houses were built in honor of the Warsaw Uprising or the history of the Polish Jews (“POLIN”, Warsaw), the history of Upper Silesia (Kattowitz), the Second World War and the citizens’ movements of Central and Eastern Europe (both in Gdansk; the latter is called “European Center of Solidarity ”). Smaller museums remind, among other things, of the emigrants (in the port city of Gdynia), of the rescuers of Jews in the Holocaust (in the village of Markowa) and many other stories.
The most recent opening took place recently in Białystok: a “Museum of Remembrance of Siberia” has been created here. The easternmost city in the country has not yet been seen as a tourist magnet. The city has been in the spotlight since autumn due to the crisis on the eastern border, the migrants who came to the EU through the wooded border region, and Belarusian threats and provocations. It is barely fifty kilometers from Poland’s eastern border and the capital of the Podlasie region.
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