Traveling exhibit coming to Lee County libraries
The Lee County Library System reported that the exhibition “Ravensbrück — We Who Lived There” will be on display at the Northwest Regional Library in Cape Coral throughout November.
Available in English and Swedish, the display was created by high school students in the Advanced History Program and the IB Diploma Program at Katedralskolan in Lund, Sweden. The exhibit is brought to the United States by Better Futures Foundation, a Sarasota-based non-profit.
“The library system is honored to be able to host this exhibit, which sheds light on the personal experiences of liberated Holocaust survivors,” Lee County Library System Director Mindi Simon said.
Toward the end of World War II, about 20,000 Nazi concentration camp survivors were evacuated to Sweden. With the intent of documenting the war crimes and experiences of the victims, a working group called “The Polish Research Institute in Lund” was founded to conduct in-depth interviews with the former prisoners and collect material that the survivors had brought with them from the camps.
The exhibit is the resulting presentation of this unique collection of source material from the camp survivors of Ravensbrück and other Nazi concentration camps.
“Based on interviews that took place immediately after the liberation of Holocaust victims to Malmo, Sweden, this exhibit provides insight into all aspects of life in Ravensbrück — a concentration camp only for women and children,” Better Futures Foundation President Richard Ohlsson said. “General knowledge about the Holocaust becomes less abstract and less theoretical when the women’s stories from arrival and through the liberation of Ravensbrück are told.”
More information can be found at https://www.ub.lu.se/witnessing-genocide.
To further explore the story, visit the FGCU Archives and Special Collections digital exhibition, “To Life: The Liberation of Ravensbrück,” at https://www.fgcu.edu/tolifeexhibit/.