The exhibition about the Portuguese who were deported to the Third Reich and subjected to forced labour in the Nazi concentration system, initially designed for the Cultural Centre of Belém, has now been extended and renovated at the Museum of Neo-Realism in Vila Franca de Xira, under the title Resistir! Os Portugueses no Sistema Concentracionário do III Reich [Resist! The Portuguese in the Concentration System of the Third Reich].

This initiative, which has the support of Vila Franca de Xira City Council, is the culmination of the collaboration between the IHC and the municipality, which began with the competition ‘Portuguese Victims of the Third Reich’, as part of the EC-funded FORCED project, and which enabled a group of students from the Professor Reynaldo dos Santos Secondary School to visit the Mauthausen Memorial.

Opening on 14 December 2024, the exhibition will be free to visit until 4 May 2025. It was curated by Fernando Rosas, Ansgar Schaefer and Cláudia Ninhos (IHC), as well as António Carvalho (National Archaeological Museum) and Cristina Clímaco (University of Paris 8 — Vincennes – Saint-Denis).

Despite Portugal’s neutrality during World War II, several hundred Portuguese were deported, mainly from France, to concentration camps, prisons, prisoner of war camps or forced to work for the Germans, both inside the Reich and in the occupied territories. As Fernando Rosas explains in the video below [in Portuguese], ‘this is a way of paying tribute to those who gave their lives, who gave their health, practically without recognition for many years; it’s a way of summoning up the memory of so many people who fought for freedom’.