Today a saint, tomorrow a bastard

When farmer Radomír Faltýnek receives a high military decoration in Prague in 2012, he quotes a well-known poem by satirist and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský. The 86-year-old Faltýnek is happy about the award - but at the same time there is also a great deal of scepticism. For 40 years he was ostracised as a "kulake" in socialist Czechoslovakia, lost ground. Before 1945, the National Socialists imprisoned him in a concentration camp and murdered his parents.

The Moravian farmer Radomír Faltýnek is one of 15 protagonists in an exhibition at the Concentration Camp Memorial Flossenbürg. They all share two things in common: They were Czechoslovak citizens and they were imprisoned in the Flossenbürg concentration camp or one of its subcamps. For many years, the KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg (Concentration Camp Memorial Flossenbürg) has been researching the lives of the approximately 4,500 Czechoslovak prisoners of this camp. Their biographies conceal moving fates that go beyond the deep cut of concentration camp imprisonment.

The synopsis of the various life stories creates an ambiguous, multi-layered mosaic in which the individual biographies take centre stage. The exhibition aims to contribute to a transnational dialogue of remembering. The exhibition is complemented by the presentation of the research results of archaeological investigations of National Socialist and Communist camps in the Bavarian-Czech border region by the Technical University of Deggendorf and the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen.

The show is being held in cooperation with the KZ-Gedenkstätte Flossenbürg (Concentration Camp Memorial Flossenbürg) and the Deggendorf University of Technology.

Last edited on 04.11.2024