The former Gestapo and NKVD remand prison in Lviv, now housing the Prison on Lontskoho Street National Memorial Museum of the Occupation Regimes’ Victims, hosted a presentation of documentary evidence revealing crimes that the occupation regimes’ organs of repression had committed in Latvia. Latvian Honorary Consul in Lviv Volodimirs Garcula joined representatives of the Baltic Studies Center and the Liberation Movement Research Center to open the exhibition, named “Latvian Tragedy. 1941” and held on the occasion of the 95th anniversary of the Latvian Republic’s Act of Independence proclamation.
The exhibition consists of 25 banners featuring photographs, reproductions of documents and newspaper articles that illustrate the criminal policy of the Soviet and Nazi totalitarian regimes on the Latvian soil, including deportations and the Holocaust, the Communist repressions, the repatriation of Germans, the Nazi occupation and repressions, as well as resistance to the occupation regimes.
“This new exhibition, brought to the museum premises that once housed the infamous prison on Lontskoho Street by the Museum of Occupation in Riga, tells the story of the Latvian tragedy of 1941, when 100,000 Latvian citizens of various ethnicities were killed,” the deputy director of the Prison on Lontskoho Street National Museum and winner of the Iryna Kalynets Prize Viktoria Sadova said. She added that the exhibition had already visited Western Europe, but Ukraine saw it for the first time.
The exhibition’s designers are historians from the Occupation Museum Ritvars Jansons and Ojars Stepens as well as employees of the Jews in Latvia Museum and Documentation Center Ilya Lensky and Marger Westerman.
The exhibition “Latvian Tragedy. 1941” will be opened at 1 Stepan Bandera Street (entrance from Bryullov Street) daily from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. until February 1, 2014.
