Prague, 31 May 2023 – The international traveling exhibition of the Platform “European Gulag” will have its Czech premiere in Prague from 6 to 30 June 2023 at the Ambit Gallery in the Franciscan Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday 7 June 2023 at 6 pm in the refectory of the Convent of Our Lady of the Snows on Jungmann Square. It will include a debate with historians Adam Hradílek, Jan Dvořák, Zdeněk Bauer and Wojciech Bednarski. Moderated by Petr Blažek.

When we hear the word ‘Gulag’, we probably first think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago: a system of thousands of forced labour camps scattered throughout the Soviet Union. However, an almost identical system existed in every country that the Communists took over after the Second World War. For more than a decade, at least 800 camps operated in the territory of the present-day European Union and its immediate neighbours. Nearly 1 500 000 people were imprisoned there, of whom 130 000 died. These camps constituted a veritable ‘European gulag’. Its history is now somewhat sidelined, and not only in countries that did not experience communism. The forced labour camps and their victims have faded from memory even in the former Eastern Bloc, and no material trace of most of them remains. Only a few former camps have now been turned into museums. With this exhibition we want to revive the memory of the thousands of victims of the communist labour camps and their suffering.

The exhibition was created by an international team of historians. The Czech version of the exhibition was prepared by the Platform in cooperation with the Twentieth Century Memorial Museum. An English-Czech catalogue will also be published to accompany the exhibition.

The exhibition was made possible by cooperation with the Polish National Foundation. The project is implemented with the financial support of the City of Prague.