A new exhibition explores the lives of women in Soviet camps through photographs of handicrafts and objects connected to the stories of 26 specific women. It brings together fragments of everyday life in the Gulag and includes several authentic exhibits. Some of the stories also have a distinct Czech touch. The exhibition was first presented on November 27 at the National Library in Prague.
Arrests, executions, prisons, Gulag camps, the dispossession of peasants, the deportation of entire nations – all this has affected millions of people in the past. Political repression in the Soviet Union was massive. The state punished not only for crimes, but also for belonging to a certain category of the population, for example, social, religious or ethnic, including the Czechs. Of course, there were women in each of these groups.
The proportion of women among prisoners of Soviet labor camps in 1941 was 13% and by the end of the war reached almost a third of all prisoners. In total, an estimated 2 million women passed through the Gulag camps, hundreds of them with Czech roots. Millions more were deported and hundreds of thousands executed. Women were arrested on the same charges as men, and they lived and worked in the camps under the same conditions. Their lives were subject to frequent humiliation and violence.
However, female prisoners in the camps often managed to find the mental and moral strength not to give up and to keep hope for a future meeting with their children and loved ones. They were often helped by the clothes and small objects that they were able to make in the camp, mostly from pieces of fabric. The central motif that connects the entire exhibition is therefore threads. Threads torn from ball gowns, threads from which embroidery is made, threads for slicing bread or sewing. These are threads that signify a connection with family outside the camp, friendship with fellow prisoners and a bond to a former life.
The exhibition consists of 22 panels with authentic stories of women and photographs of mainly handmade objects, supplemented by several original objects that will be physically presented to visitors. This is an adapted version of the exhibition "Material", which was originally presented by the Memorial association in Moscow in autumn 2021. The first Czech presentation of the exhibition took place on November 27, 2024 at the National Library in Prague under the title "Threads of Memories - The Fates of Women in the Gulag".
The authors are the Memorial organization (Memorial Zukunft, NIPC Memorial, Memorial ČR) and Gulag.cz in cooperation with the National Library of the Czech Republic - Slavic Library.
Theme: Irina Ostrovskaja
Concept and texts: Irina Ostrovskaja, Petra Černoušková, Štěpán Černoušek
Graphic design: Hynek Reich Štětka
Photographs of objects: Jurij Palmin, Darja Krotova, Štěpán Černoušek
Printing: Apostolos Joanidis
Translations: Antonín Hluštík
Language editing: Josef Greš
Proofreading: Magdaléna Hájková
Exhibition production: Petra Černoušková
.jpg)
