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Ambassador of the Czech Republic in Riga Opened the Exhibition "Jews in the Gulag. Czechoslovak Jews in the Soviet Labor Camps During the World War II"

On Tuesday, February 7, 2017 the Ambassador of the Czech Republic in Riga Mr. Miroslav Kosek opened the exhibition "Jews in the gulag” in the premises of the Jewish Museum. The topic of the exhibition covers the fates of Czechoslovak Jews in Soviet labor camps during the World War II.
 

The exhibition is organized by Vaclav Havel Library in cooperation with the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Czech Centres. The authors of the exhibition are Mr. Jan Dvořák and Mr. Adam Hradilek.
In his introductory presentation, Mr. Jan Dvořák (USTR) acquainted the guests from the diplomatic corps, the Jewish community and Latvian-Czech Society with the whole project "Czechoslovaks in the gulag (1918-1956)", the exhibition is the part of it. In his speech, he emphasized the basic historical context and reminded that previous researches are based on interviews with survivors and newly discovered archival documents.
 

At the beginning of World War II hundreds of thousands of refugees from Nazi-occupied countries of Europe sought the shelter in many countries around the world and faced with a various degree of understanding and openness from the part of local governments. The refugees in the Soviet Union met with a specific treatment. Many of the refugees who escaped the Nazi persecution were arrested by the Soviet authorities, accused of illegal entry or of espionage, and were enslaved in Gulag labor camps.

The exhibition presents ten portraits of Jewish refugees whose fates the authors of the exhibition managed to obtain, directly or indirectly, including the testimonies of archival documents. Most of them belonged to the refugees into Soviet territory who came in the beginning of World War II followed by two major refugee waves through Poland and Ruthenia. Their subsequent fates therefore were more or less similar. Almost all of them were sentenced to prison in the Soviet correctional labor camps. Some of them were released even during the war and were engaged in anti-Nazi resistance (mostly as soldiers of the Czechoslovak military units in the USSR), others were relased after the war, some died in the Soviet labor camps.