Between the Public and the Private: The First Postwar Exhibitions of the Holocaust in Poland

On April 28, 2026, Dr Agata Pietrasik will give a scholarly seminar entitled Between the Public and the Private: The First Postwar Exhibitions of the Holocaust in Poland.

On April 19, 1948, the Museum of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw opened to the public, presenting three exhibitions. One of them, Martyrdom and Struggle, prepared by the Museum’s director Giza Frenkel, was devoted entirely to the history of the Holocaust in Poland.

Based on the pioneering research of the Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, the exhibition presented documents, photographs, and artefacts collected at sites of Jewish extermination, as well as maps and models created specifically for the display. Its aim was not only to show the scale of violence and destruction, but also to offer a tangible representation of the victims’ perspective. At the same time, the exhibition constituted a form of resistance to the processes of erasure and marginalization of the Holocaust that were already visible in the first postwar years.

The lecture will present these early exhibitions as part of broader, though often ephemeral, activities of the Jewish Historical Commission, including press conferences, presentations of archival materials, and local photographic exhibitions. The meeting will provide an opportunity to reflect on the role of exhibitions as tools of commemoration, documentation, and public communication of the experience of the Holocaust in the immediate postwar period.


Agata Pietrasik is an art historian and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin, and the author of Art in a Disrupted World (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2021). She is currently working on the project How Exhibitions Rebuilt Europe: Exhibiting War Crimes in the 1940s. In 2025, she curated the exhibition On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945–1948 at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.


Photo: An exhibition organized by the Provincial Historical Commission in 1945 in Białystok