Poznań, Budapest, Győr, Mosonmagyaróvár. Hungarians and Poles in 1956 (2016)

On the 60^th anniversary of the Revolution of 1956 open-air exhibitions were organised in Győr and Poznań by the Museum of the Hungarian Parliament and the Poznań Division of the Polish Institute for National Remembrance in conjunction with the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Warsaw, the Local Government of Győr and the Municipality of Poznań.

The exhibitions focused on the ‘Poznań June’, the ‘bloody Thursday‘ on Budapest’s Kossuth Square, and the antecedents and events of the massacre in Győr from the period of the revolution.

The exhibition sought to pay tribute within the framework the 1956 memorial year and the year of Hungarian-Polish solidarity to the victims of the events of 60 years before, while giving the opportunity to visitors to remember the most important moments in the struggle for freedom and battle waged against oppression by the two nations.

The twelve panels set up in both venues as well as of contemporaneous documents, archive footage and films projected onto a large-scale LED wall illustrated how the communist dictatorship exercising power in the name of the people so mercilessly quashed those same people when they resisted.

The exhibitions also highlighted that in 1956 – as in so many times during the course of history – the Hungarian and Polish nations set themselves similar objectives. It followed from this that an integral link connected the Polish people’s rising against dictatorship and the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The brutality of the authorities was similar in Poznań, in Budapest’s Kossuth Square, in Győr and in Mosonmagyaróvár.

The show could be viewed in Poznań between 20 October and 4 November 2016 and in Győr from 23 October to 4 November.