IRK Museum – evidence of humanity

During the recent escalation, medical personnel implemented what they learned from ICRC experts; “That saved many lives,” wrote Dr. some time ago. Raafat Jaarour, the head of the Gaza Medical Emergency Education and Training Department. The abbreviation ICRC stands for the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in 1863. This is based in Geneva. The trigger for the emergence of the global humanitarian Red Cross and later the Red Crescent movement was the work “Un Souvenir de Solferino” by the Swiss businessman and humanitarian Henry Dunant, published in 1862, which was published in a new German edition that year: “A Memoir of Solferino” . The ICRC is an independent, neutral organization that provides humanitarian protection and assistance to people affected by armed conflict and other violence. The ICRC’s administration building has its own museum attached. Its collection includes 14,000 posters, 12,000 photographs and around 1,000 objects made by prisoners or internees. The museum’s presentation is divided into two sections: the permanent and a temporary exhibition.

There is a special object in the entrance area: the original-sized bronze cast of a children’s tricycle that once belonged to three-year-old Shinichi Tetsutani. The boy was traveling with it in Hiroshima when the US Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on the city on August 6, 1945. Shinichi’s family donated the tricycle to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 1985. The bronze sculpture, created by Akira Fujimoto and Cannon Hersey, is a gift from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) to the city of Geneva and the ICRC Museum.

The permanent exhibition “The Humanitarian Adventure” begins with the presentation of the Red Cross principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntariness, unity and universality. The central area is the room in which prisoners’ works are exhibited. It is intended to commemorate the violence that has left its mark over the last hundred years: in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Chile, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Israel, etc. The exhibits in question were handed over to ICRC employees who were prisoners or… visited internees. The legal basis for such visits is the Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Additional Protocols of 1977.

The red clothing of a North Korean prisoner of war refers to the war that raged on the Far Eastern peninsula from 1951 to 1953, a sculpture made of soap to the oppression in Myanmar, and a mosque made in an Israeli prison by Lebanese inmates with astonishing craftsmanship to the conflicts in the Middle East and a guitar made from milk powder cartons on the wars of independence and decolonization. In another room, dozens of photos taken in 1994 of Rwandan children who were separated from their parents during the genocide can be seen on a wall. Information on the historical background of events in Rwanda is shown on a board. You can read messages from prisoners that were sent by the ICRC to their relatives. In the past, the ICRC messengers often had to travel long distances to do this. Dunant’s diagrams, created between 1877 and 1890, which he used to illustrate his understanding of humanity, are also presented. They contain a timeline from Noah’s Ark to the apocalypse once feared by the founder of the aid organization.

Here and there you can hear pieces of music from playlists with titles like “Humanity”, “Care”, or “Dignity”, such as “Running Like the Red Cross” by Diunna Greenleaf, “Different Trains” by Steve Reich (who is on the… transport of Jewish people to concentration camps), “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday or “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone.

The index of the archive of the International Central Office for Prisoners of War (1914–1923) takes up a large part of the ICRC’s permanent exhibition. It records the prisoners of war from the First World War. The file contains six million cards that document the fate of two million prisoners of war and interned civilians. It is divided by country. The cards contain information about the time of arrest, place of detention and, if applicable, date of death. In recognition of the exceptional importance of this archive, UNESCO has included it in the “Memory of Humanity” documentary world heritage.

Information and documents are also offered on the work of the International Tracing Service, which was set up by the Allies in 1943 and has been located in Bad Arolsen in Germany since 1946. From 1955 to 2012 it was administered by the ICRC. The International Tracing Service has dossiers on more than 17 million people, including people persecuted by the Nazis, Jews, forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners, but also children separated from their families during the war or those displaced from fascism after the liberation . Thanks to this search service, we learn here that 2.2 million people were able to find their relatives between 1982 and 2007.

The current temporary exhibition, which will be on display until August next year, acoustically underlines emotions. The impressive installation of mostly rhythmic sounds was designed by students from l’Ecole de Design et Haute Ecole d’Art du Valais using tapes from the ICRC’s sound archive. Fortunately, archival materials are honored here, which, in contrast to written or photographic remains, unfortunately receive far too little attention.

Museum of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Avenue de la Paix 17, 1202 Geneva, Switzerland. www.redcrossmuseum.ch

Iron principles of the IRK are humanity, impartiality, independence and universality.

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