Wednesday 4 March 2026
16:00-18:00, ANU Sir Roland Wilson Building, Lady Wilson Room, 120 McCoy Circuit, Canberra, ACT 2600
On 4 March 2026, the ANU Centre for European Studies (ANUCES), in collaboration with the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, was delighted to host a seminar with Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, Director of The Sybir Memorial Museum (Bialystok, Poland).
The Sybir Memorial Museum won the prestigious 2024 Council of Europe Museum Prize, the most important museum award in Europe, for its outstanding work in documenting the 1940-1941 Soviet deportations of Poles to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Professor Śleszyński will discuss the Museum’s role and approaches, and the rationale behind its permanent exhibition, focusing on how oral histories are integrated into the broader museum collection. He will also reflect on the methodological questions that oral history raises for museum and heritage practice more broadly: the value of personal testimony for museums, the relationship between individual memory and collective history, and the institutional frameworks that enable museums to work responsibly with such collections and make them meaningful to future audiences.
Professor Śleszyński’s talk will be followed by a conversation with Anna Pacewicz, one of the founders of the Kresy-Syberia Foundation, who will reflect on the methodological and ethical challenges of working with survivor memory, and on how testimonies are gathered and preserved within the Australian context, where the Siberian stories have long been overlooked and remain largely unknown to the broader public.
This collaboration offers an opportunity to reflect on the role of international partnerships in heritage work, and also serves as a point of departure for a broader discussion on where such collections belong. When testimonies are gathered from diaspora communities settled far from their country of origin, questions of ownership, custodianship, and access become both ethically and institutionally complex.
The seminar was hosted as part of the project "Memory, Democracy and Transnational Reconciliation" led by Dr Kasia Williams (ANUCES) and funded by the European Union.
'Memory lives all around us and in us,' writes one of our students, reflecting on the seminar with Professor Wojciech Śleszyński. Here is her account in full:
"Memory lives all around us and in us. It shapes our identity as individuals and nations, the decisions we make in the present, the parts of our past that we try to forget, or the hopes we have for the future. It can bring people together, creating societal cohesion, or can reinforce divides and lead to conflict. No community can function without referring to the past.
What happens when memories are suppressed or controlled for generations? How can we allow these memories to surface and occupy the space that they deserve in the present? How can we find an appropriate physical space for them when they are of an inherently transnational nature?
These questions are at the heart of The Sybir Memorial Museum in Bialystok, Poland, the only museum in the world dedicated to documenting the 1940-1941 Soviet deportations of Poles to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Yesterday afternoon, I had the opportunity, along with other students, researchers and members of the community, to attend a seminar with Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, the museum’s director. His visit to Australia had a special purpose: to officially receive the testimonies of Australian Polish survivors who suffered, or whose families suffered, these deportations. He was kind enough to also visit us at the ANU, where he was joined in conversation by Anna Pacewicz. Anna is one of the founders of the Kresy-Syberia Foundation, an organisation that predated the museum by some years and has made an enormous contribution to it by bringing together and preserving the memories of these families.
As a third-generation Australian whose family emigrated to Australia in the wake of the Second World War from then-Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands, I was immediately captivated by the story behind the Sybir Memorial Museum. Although my family’s history unfolded in entirely different circumstances, the sense of having lost something dear to one’s identity, of not quite belonging anywhere, and of a deep need to understand why, resonated strongly with me.
Indeed, the capacity to emotionally connect with people from all walks of life, no matter what your family history, is a strength of the museum’s innovative approach. Professor Śleszyński explained to us, with the aid of a beautiful series of photos of the location, that it has been conceived as an immersive experience. Instead of being overloaded with historical details, visitors are invited into the history as experienced by the people who lived it. For example, audio recordings from survivors are integrated with photos and belongings, and there is even a drop in temperature as visitors take the symbolic passage from Poland to Siberia. By communicating history in such tangible ways, the museum leads the public not just to reflect on but experience our shared humanity.
It is not difficult to understand why the museum won the prestigious Council of Europe Museum Prize, the most important museum award in Europe, in 2024. During an era of political polarisation and social division, the Sybir Memorial Museum showcases the power and importance of investing in projects that tell the stories of marginalised and persecuted communities. As we learn to listen and make space for one another’s memories, we create our common future.
On behalf of all attendees, I’d like to extend a big thank you to Professor Wojciech Śleszyński, Anna Pacewicz, Stefan Wiśniowski and everyone else who enabled the seminar yesterday to occur."
Daniela Lisacek