A historical exhibition created by Michael Daniel Sagatis

Showing at: The Shoah Cellar Museum until January 2017
Address: 1077 Budapest, Wesselényi utca 9
(Museum admission: HUF 3,000/2000 guided/non -guided tour)

It focuses around the true story of a matriarchal figure, Józefa, the artist’s great-grandmother who Michael discovered was deported from East Poland in April, 1940 by the Soviet secret police and exiled to Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan. From her isolated location, Józefa would write a collection of letters that Michael would extract from oblivion, 75 years later and over 5000 kms from where they first originated.

In 2016, a team of international translators and philologists were passed Józefa’s letters. Her decoded last words and thoughts not only reveal a compelling and individual hand written testimony as to the living conditions under Stalin’s ethnic cleansing programme but also an insight into the emotional trauma suffered by a mother, forced to work for strangers in distant lands, that is communicating with her children the hope of return and the despair of impossibility.

Although Józefa would perish alongside forgotten millions that suffered a similar fate, Michael has artistically recreated Józefa’s identity from her decoded letters, restored photographs, poignant music and researched historical events. The results of his journey would confirm the realization of how some of the most brutal repression policies of the Soviet totalitarian regime would play an essential role in the genesis for his own creation.

The exhibition of Józefa’s letters is being shown at The Shoah Cellar Museum, the one and only Shoah museum that is located in a former Nazi bunker. NB.

The exhibition is partly in English & partly in Hungarian.