Forced to Work – Willing to Survive | Forced Labour in the Past and Present

The international traveling exhibition “Forced to Work – Willing to Survive” was developed as a joint Erasmus+ project by partners from Italy, Austria, and Poland. It sheds light on the mass phenomenon of Nazi forced labor through personal biographies, bringing into focus the experiences of civilian workers, prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates, and persecuted Jews from across Europe. At the same time, the exhibition compares the different historical contexts in occupied Poland, annexed Austria, and Italy, which remained allied with Nazi Germany until 1943. A final section builds a bridge to the present: despite international agreements, millions of people worldwide are still affected by modern forms of exploitation. In this way, the exhibition illustrates what forced labor means—then as now.