From 1938 to 1953, the largest involuntary migration of Europeans in history took place. It was caused and, at the same time, also executed by the monster Nazi ideology, and after the war by the onset of another totalitarian regime, this time the communist one.

To this day, historians are still uncovering local and individual dramas, previously unknown or forgotten in the context of the overall evaluation of events. Being aware that each of them had a fatal impact on the lives of particular people, the exhibition is only able to symbolically recollect the stories of some of those who had been trying to escape.

The mass movement of people streaming throughout the Europe in the 1940s is presented through amateur photographs in much the same way that the fates of contemporary refugees are presented today. Back then it was “us”, today it is “them”; the personal stories of the people are the same. A similar intensity has also been sought in the artworks that co-create the dual structure of the exhibition. Photography records drama in which the individual is manipulated and becomes part of the anonymous crowd. Artwork comes out of anonymity, declares personal freedom, rebels against manipulation and addresses a particular person. It transcends reality and transports it into a generalizing position.

The exhibition features almost sixty works of art by more than thirty visual artists. The works of art of the 1930s–1950s (paintings, drawings, collages, confrontages, photographs and sculptures) are presented in a unique concept accompanying them with more than 150 documentary photographs of the same period, printed out on opal plexiglass.

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