06/05/2026
© Comité Conmemoratívo del Holocausto
In his memoir, Jorge Semprun recounts that his mentor, Maurice Halbwachs - the professor at the Collège de France and the creator of the concept of collective memory - died in his arms in the Buchenwald concentration camp in March 1945. After his death,
it was Semprun himself who had to erase Halbwachs’ name, and all signs of his identity (1) from the central registry of the Arbeitstatistik, so that from that moment on - at least in the intention of the bureaucrats of death—he was not only dead but also annihilated even in death.
The memory of the Holocaust is a difficult heritage (2), a legacy that forces us to confront some of the hardest and most sensitive questions of human existence and the most extreme life situations. This remains true even as the number of Holocaust survivors continues to decrease, and Holocaust remembrance shifts from living, active group
memory to becoming part of historical-cultural memory. With the destruction of communities and individuals, collective memory was broken and damaged, creating a deep gap between the lost past and the present. Alongside traditional Jewish forms of mourning and remembrance, the institution of the museum-dedicated to preserving documents and memories - has been established to safeguard the remaining traces and reconstruct memory. The incorporation of Holocaust memory into the historical-cultural and commemorative canon, and the recurring demand for related exhibitions, continuously challenges museums and cultural centers to engage further. The project “Unfinished Landscape" presents the memory of the Holocaust through three works by Dan Pagis. This creates the illusion of a return to the past, transforming distant and alienated objects into something both personal:it initiates the visitor, making them a quasi-witness, while also articulating a new exhibition concept as a practice of combating antisemitism.
Maylin Cordero Martinez and Levente Németi
1 Jorge Semprun, L’écriture ou la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 38–39.
2 Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Hermitage, Negotiating the Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (London: Taylor&Francis, 2008).
