Without liberation

The residents of Érd and its neighbourhood in the labour camps of the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1954.

The exhibition entitled Without Liberation depicts the suffering and vulnerability of the participants in “malenki robot" through billboards, photos, as well as contemporary objects for use and conversations with the survivors. The exhibition also touches upon the fate and the afflictions of the deportees’ family members who remained at home.

The exhibition commemorates the nearly 700,000 Hungarian citizens and our approximately 2800 compatriots in Érd who fell into Soviet captivity after the Second World War. We do not know the names of many, and we know little about their fate. The reason for silence is the consciously induced lack of knowledge. From 1945, the communist state power gave the false impression for decades that only those soldiers were taken away by the Soviets who were captured during military actions. In fact, a third of the prisoners were civilians deported to forced labour. A large number of Hungarian citizens were sent to the GULAG camps on fabricated charges. The prisoners of war and the civilian internees had to work for years in the forced labour camps of the Soviet Union. Museum founder Dénes Balázs was also taken to the Sumgait prison camp, where he spent 3.5 years.