Ausstellung: »Flüchtiges Glück – Befreiung aus Theresienstadt«. Um Fotografien erweitert und bis 12. März 2025 verlängert!

In the organizer's words:

Term extended: November 14, 2024 to March 12, 2025

Towards the end of the Second World War, international aid organizations and committed individuals succeeded in buying the release of large groups of prisoners from the concentration camps. In this way, around 4,300 prisoners from Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen came to Switzerland in the final months of the war. The exhibition at the GHH uses selected biographies and photographs to document the story of the only rescue train from the Theresienstadt ghetto, also known as the "waiting room to hell Auschwitz and Treblinka", in February 1945. This train saved around 1,200 Jewish people from certain death in the extermination camps. They had previously been ransomed by the "Orthodox Rabbinical Association in the USA and Canada" for five million Swiss francs. At the time, the negotiations were led by a Swiss politician who was in contact with SS chief Heinrich Himmler. The German side hoped that the exchange would not only provide urgently needed foreign currency, but also have a positive propaganda effect to improve their international reputation. The Jewish deportees were taken by train from Theresienstadt via Eger, Nuremberg and Constance to St. Gallen in Switzerland.

A joint event by the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Haus Foundation, the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Düsseldorf e.V. and the sponsoring and support association Ehemalige Synagoge Rexingen e.V.

Supported by the Baden-Württemberg State Center for Political Education