FACE TO FACE

The Falstad Centre’s permanent museum exhibition, “Face to Face” is based in the cellar area of the Falstad building. Through texts, photographs, films, interviews and artefacts the exhibition binds the Centre’s two themed fields of focus: the history of imprisonment during World War II and human rights. The exhibition opened to the public in October 2006 and today is important both as a meeting point and a learning arena.

In the first part of the exhibition the story of Falstad Prison Camp from 1941-45 is integrated into a larger national and international perspective. Special place is dedicated to the advancement of Nazism and the National Socialist camp system, the genocide of Europe’s Jews and the war of extermination on the Eastern Front.

All of these catastrophes had ramifications for Norway and Falstad. At the same time that Norwegian Jews were being deported from Falstad to extermination camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau, several hundred East European prisoners of war and forced labourers, captured on the Eastern Front, came to Falstad. In addition several hundred Norwegian political prisoners were deported from Falstad to various concentration camps on the continent.

The final section deals with the connecting line between the extermination policies of the Nazis during World War II and the development of the United Nations and human rights after 1945. Modern genocide and crimes against humanity form an important conclusion for ”Face to Face”. The concept aims to stimulate historical awareness and increased reflection on the meaning of the Falstad story for us – now and in the future.