Museum – Memorial Site in Bełżec
Poland · Europe
About
Bełżec Museum and Memorial Site, also known as Museum – Memorial Site in Bełżec is a memorial complex and martyrology museum located on the grounds of the former German Nazi Belzec extermination camp, commemorating approximately 450,000 Jews from Poland and other European countries who were killed there between 1942 and 1943.
For nearly 20 years, the former camp grounds remained unmarked and unsecured. The first monument was unveiled there only in 1963. It did not include elements indicating that the victims of the camp were of Jewish nationality and soon began to fall into disrepair. In the second half of the 1990s, based on an agreement between the Polish government and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, work began on a new memorial. On 1 January 2004, the Museum – Memorial Site in Bełżec was established as a branch of the Majdanek State Museum. Six months later, the new memorial complex was unveiled.
Both the monument-cemetery and the museum exhibition were positively received by experts and art critics.
Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)。Photography via Wikimedia Commons.