The Exhibition
Nijmegen, Bordeaux, Vienna, Lublin, Zaporizhzhia, Berlin – these are a few of the thousands of places in Europe, large and small, from which people were deported to Dachau concentration camp between 1933 and 1945. The international travelling exhibition “Names Instead of Numbers” shows a selection of 22 biographies from the Dachau Remembrance Book project. The exhibition will be shown in five languages and displayed in Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, and Poland. The accompanying brochure contains 84 pages, and is available in German, English, Dutch, French, Polish, and Ukrainian.
The Dachau Exhibition will be coming to Carleton on February 9th, 2012, and will remain in the Department of History until March 9th, 2012. (Click here to see the Department’s website.) The launch of the exhibit, with Sabine Gerhardus, will take place on February 9th. The link below features information about the exhibition and its launch. Exhibition booklets can be purchased at the main office in the Department of History for 10$.
Names Instead of Numbers Poster
“Names Instead of Numbers” closed at Carleton University on March 9th, 2012. Its next stop is at the Westminster United Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba. To view the guestbook from the exhibition’s stay at Carleton, click on the link below.
Names Instead of Numbers Guestbook
The Dachau Remembrance Book
The Remembrance Book is a growing collection of biographies featuring former prisoners of Dachau. Over 100 biographies in various languages have been written since 1999. School and university students, adults, and relatives of former prisoners participate in the project in order to remember the lives of individual prisoners of Dachau and to actively come to terms with the history of National Socialism. With the help of the project supervisor, they establish contact with Dachau survivors or the relatives and conduct interviews with them. They perform historical and archival research and, after reviewing all of their sources, compose a biography. The biographies are written entirely by the project participants and include pictures and original documents. For information on this book and the exhibition, please click on the link below.
Remembrance Book for the Prisoners of the Dachau Concentration Camp
Curator Sabine Gerhardus speaks at the exhibit launch in the Department of History, Carleton University
All biographies in the Dachau Remembrance Book are researched, written and arranged by voluntary participants. Through their commitment they make it possible to bring back to life the history of a previously
persecuted individual, leaving traces of life to protect against forgetting. Through relatively independent research the participants collect information about the fate of an individual, their family and friends. For this no previous historical knowledge is necessary, it is however expected that participants are prepared to get involved in the working ways of the project, whilst also being conscious of responsibility and
committed. The research is conducted alongside seminar offers and carried out within the framework of a work group.
Sabine Gerhardus gives a tour of the exhibit to graduate students in the Department of History, Carleton University
The Curator:
Since 1999, Sabine Gerhardus is the project leader on the exhibit and the Dachau Remembrance Book. She won awards for the Remembrance Book Project, including the Citizen Culture Prize of the Bavarian State Parliament (2010), Selected Place “Germany Land of Ideas” (2010), and the Prize winner in the competition “Active for Democracy with “Confederation for Democracy and Tolerance.”
The Exhibition and the Remembrance Book are financed by the following organizations:
Bavarian State Office for Political Education
Bavarian State Chancellery
Bavarian Teachers’ Association
Region of Upper Bavaria
Borislav Bjelicic
EU, Europe for Citizens’ Programme – “Active European Remembrance”
Protestant-Lutheran Church of Bavaria
The City of Dachau
House of Bavarian History
Department of Culture, Bavarian Capital, Munich
Dachau Camp Association
Renovabis, Solidarity Action for Eastern Europe
The City of Heidelberg
Foundation of Bavarian Memorial Sites
White Rose Foundation
Numerous individual donations
The “Names Instead of Numbers” exhibit at Carleton University is made possible with the support of:
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Department of History, the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies, the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Centre for European Studies, the Carleton Centre for Public History, the Carleton University Art Gallery, the Communications Office, the Alumni Office, Shannon Endowment in Canadian Social History, and the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.
