A museum designed by artist Gerhard Richter for his Birkenau cycle opens Friday near the former Auschwitz concentration camp. Guests from Poland, Israel, Germany, France and the USA take part in the ceremony
part, as the International Auschwitz Committee (IAK) explained. Whose
President and Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski, Vice President
Christoph Heubner, and Chancellor Wolfgang Schmidt (SPD)
design the opening.
The “Birkenau” cycle is considered one of the most important groups of works
of the artist. Based on photographs taken in 1944
Birkenau extermination camp were secretly recorded, he has in
In 2014, their motifs were adopted as a template, in several
Painted over and changed again and again during each work cycle.
Richter’s exhibition a “powerful signal against forgetting”
Richter created a “synagogal space” with the museum,
said the initiator of the project, Christoph Heubner the Evangelical
Press service. That this entire ensemble is now in its place
the place of its prehistory, just a few kilometers from the
Birkenaus crematoriums and ash fields are for survivors
of Auschwitz-Birkenau »a lasting and powerful signal against
forgetting and a sign of compassion and solidarity,”
that the artist brings to them and their murdered families.
According to the committee, the four original photographs were taken in 1944
at the risk of their lives by prisoners of the Sonderkommando near the gas chamber and crematorium number 5 in the Birkenau camp. They are considered the only photographic documents of the Holocaust, in which the murder and burning of Jewish people in Auschwitz
is held. They were only published after the end of the
Second worldwar.
Gerhard Richter told the epd that for him it was permanent
Exhibition in Oswiecim »an award, a consolation and that too
Feeling of a completed task.” There are many other places
of this horror, but Auschwitz as a name is a symbol for them all
and that must be remembered. Judge was appointed on February 9th
Born in Dresden in 1932. He fled the GDR in 1961 and now lives in
Köln. epd