Sighet Memorial’s Temporary Exhibitions Draw Enthusiastic Crowds

Two temporary exhibitions opened at the Sighet Memorial are a great success among visitors

The temporary exhibitions that were opened on June the 13th this year at the Sighet Memorial are proving to be a great success among the visitors. Several hundreds of people that visited the Memorial in the last month visited the exhibitions Women enemies of people and “Jan Palach, a living torch”.

Visitors were impressed by the stories of the extraordinary women presented in the exhibition. Although the space dedicated to this exhibition is fatally limited and constrained to entail only several dozen stories of the thousands of tragedies and dramas. As any other totalitarian regime, Communism did not take into account factors such as age, gender, state of health or cultural level of the people it repressed. ‘Enemies of the people’ weren’t only adults, but also children, weren’t only men, but also women. Countrywomen and female aristocrats, intellectual and simple women, older women, teenagers or even girls, pregnant and postnatal women, as well as women with breastfed children were considered to pose a potential threat to the regime.

Many of the visitors, among them students and pupils, learned for the first time about the concept of self-immolation as a form of protest from the exhibition “Jan Palach, a living torch”, and left impressed by the determination shown by many to awake the society even if it is in a shocking way, in order to resist the communist oppression.

Both exhibitions can be visited at the Memorial until early September this year.

“Women Enemies of the People,” an exhibition of the Sighet Memorial to the Victims of Communism, curated by Virginia Ion, designed by Zeppelin Design
“Jan Palach, a living torch”, exhibition created by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Czech Republic, curated by Petr Blazek, Romanian version created in partnership with the Sighet Memorial.

Sighet Memorial was awarded the European Heritage Label in 2017.