Exhibition

October 2025

This site ist for English readers and gives essential information about the Exhibition The Girls of Room 28. 

The exhibition was created to complement the book The Girls of Room 28, first published in April 2004 by Droemer Publishing House, Munich. The idea was to make it easier for the survivors to tell their stories to young people along the panels. This hope was fulfilled. For many years, the survivors accompanied the exhibition and shared their stories with young people all over the country, especially in Germany and the Czech Republic.

Today this is no longer possible. Most of the survivors are no longer alive. But their legacy lives on—in the publications of Edition Room 28, in the images and testimonies captured in the exhibition, and in the extensive audio and film archive of the author Hannelore Brenner, which is a treasure trove of material waiting to be explored for use in the exhibition and educational project. Her archive is a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning about the experiences and fates of the Girls of Room 28. 

Our aim is to maintain and modernise our existing exhibition and continue offering it to schools. Ideally, we would like to build partnerships with schools and educational institutions interested in our exhibition and in our educational project. 

Furthermore, we strive to create two new forms for our exhibition: 

• An international Online-Exhibition and digital platform for the Room 28 educational project 
• A Permanent Exibition devoted to the Legacy of the Girls of Room 28.

The author Hannelore Brenner has an extensive media archive with audio recordings/interviews with the survivors of Room 28 and further survivors of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. These interviews began with her research for the radio-documentary about the children's opera "Brundibár" produced by Sender Freies Berlin in 1997 under the title "Brundibár and the children of Theresienstadt" and a year later by Austrian Radio in Vienna. It was then when the author allied with the group of women who once lived in Room 28 in the Girls' Home L410 together. The interviews were continued till the book came out in 2004. Further film and interview projects followed, all of them forming part of the Room 28 Media Archive. 

Many quotes in the book and in the exhibition The Girls of Room 28 come from this precious media-archive. We will explore and digitise it and make it a part of the exhibition and the educational project thus bringing the story to life and 

highlighting the special quality and authenticity of this project of remembrance.

The first pages of the Compendium gives an impression of how this project started, sheds light on the work of the author with these women and on their annual meetings in Spindlermühle/Czech Republic starting in September 1998. You are welcome to download these pages. 

• English film: The Girls of Room 28. Promotionfilm for a planned English documentary. Room 28 Production,15' 
• German film: Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt. Auf den Spuren der Mädchen von Zimmer 28. 2009. Room 28 Production, 12'
• German film: Die Mädchen von Zimmer 28. Erinnerungen von Helga Kinsky, Ela Weissberger, Anna Hanusová. Marienbad, September 2010, 15'
• Memory Drops. Film made in Israel by Eliana Schejter and Addie Reiss for Room 28. Hanka Weingarten, Handa Drori, Judith Rosenzweig, Eva Zohar and Vera Kreiner remember Room 28. 2012,12'. 

We share the film Memory Drops with those interested in our project and considering to support our Project of Remembrance and Education.

The project was born out of the genuine desire of the survivors to remember and has grown over a decade into a flame of memory, friendship and hope, kept alive by those who were touched and inspired by their story. It is a story that is more than a chapter of the Holocaust and "More than memories of a dark time", as Professor Peter Gstettner titled his contribution to the Compendium.   

We gladly  offer you to read his contribution of the Compendium as well as those from Detlef Pech and Bertram Noback, all renowned educational scientists and experts in Holocaust education. 

Our vision: is to bring the results, findings and collections of the project together, to anchor it to a place which allows present and future generations all over
Europe to get to know their story and to learn from it.