From January 8 to February 8, the Förderkreis Alter Leipziger Bahnhof (Friends of the Old Leipzig Railway Station) will be showing the exhibition “TRANSIT – Pictures from Exile” in the rooms of the Zentralwerk e.V. It brings together works by the Argentine-Jewish artist Mónica Laura Weiss, which deal intensively with the themes of persecution, flight, and exile of a Jewish family from Dresden.
The exhibition is open from January 9 to February 8, 2026, Thursday through Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m. and Sunday from 3 to 6 p.m.
We cordially invite interested teachers and student groups to register for specific group tours and to use the exhibition for discussion in history and ethics classes. Upon prior arrangement, school groups can visit the exhibition on any weekday from 10 a.m. onwards.
The exhibition is particularly suitable for independent learning on the topics of Nazi dictatorship, expulsion, flight, and exile, using the example of a specific Jewish family from Dresden.
Those interested can register at:
✉ info [at] alter-leipziger-bahnhof.net
🕻 +49 174 498 009 6
Contact persons: Gabriele & Alexander Atanassow
About the exhibition:
Persecution and flight did not begin with the outbreak of war by the German Wehrmacht on September 1, 1939. Hatred and incitement, exclusion, persecution, and stigmatization of alleged foreigners and dissenters began with the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933.
Argentinian artist Mónica Laura Weiss is the daughter, niece, and granddaughter of the Reizes family from Dresden. The family did not return to Dresden from their vacation in Marienbad in 1933. The father’s sister, Paula, had warned them about the Gestapo, which had searched Rudolf Reizes’ company for “forbidden” correspondence and foreign currency. This marked the beginning of the Jewish Reizes family’s odyssey of escape from the Nazi regime of terror via Austria and Palestine to Argentina. Paula, née Gutmann, was able to warn her brother Rudolf’s family about the Nazi persecution, but she herself was deported from Breslau to Theresienstadt and did not survive the Shoah. In her works, the artist processes her German-Jewish family roots and the “long shadows of the past,” as she herself calls them. Her pictures reflect motifs of persecution, flight, lost homeland, and the experiences of an existence caught between two cultures. The daughter, the artist, contrasts her mother’s life in exile from Dresden with images of her own childhood in Argentina, using documents from the family archive. Her book objects feature photographs and other documents as a backdrop for small objects and poems in German by various authors who were also forced into exile.
With the kind support of:
In cooperation with:
