Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt – 360° Panorama of the Hiding Place

This windowless room at the back of the Workshop for the Blind is where the Horn family lived for nine months in 1943. At that time the doorway was hidden behind a wardrobe and the room was accessed through that wardrobe. During a raid in October 1943 the Horn family was discovered. They were sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp. The room is still to be found at the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt. This 360-degree image shows how it looks today.

You can use your mouse to navigate around the room and to zoom in and out, so that you can explore every corner.

We enter the room on one of its longer sides through the doors of a simple white wardrobe. The room is only a few square meters in size. It is around four meters long, three meters wide, and two-and-a-half meters high.

The whiteish plaster walls have no wallpaper but are printed with a faded floral pattern in light red. On each of the four walls this pattern is framed with a bright-blue border of around 20 centimeters wide, mostly outlined in reddish brown. The border runs along the top, sides and bottom of each wall. At the bottom it is flush with the very short dark-brown baseboards, at the top it stops around 30 centimeters beneath the ceiling.  The plaster on the walls is covered in small holes.

Opposite the door, on the other long side of the room, is a slight recess about one-and-a-half meters up the wall. It is approximately 30 by 40 centimeters in size and around two centimeters deep. It is dirty white in color.

The door’s narrow wooden frame is painted in dark-brown varnish. To the left of the door is a small tiled stove, also dark brown. It is around 1.2 meters tall and 80 centimeters wide. Out of the top leads a thick, black pipe that extends up around a meter before bending 90 degrees and disappearing into the shorter wall on the left.

On the right-hand wall is an opening at window height, bricked up with large whiteish blocks. The opening is around 1.2 meters high, 80 centimeters wide, and 20 centimeters deep. There used to be an emergency fire door here. The hinges in the reddish-brown painted doorframe are evidence of that.

The floor is made of broad, worn-out wooden floorboards whose matt, dark-brown varnish has flaked off in many places. The ceiling has numerous long cracks running across it. Spreading across the right half of the ceiling, close to the former emergency fire door, is a large yellowish stain that comes from old water damage.