‘Ultimately, my grandfather did not return, but this diary did,’ summarised photographer Damian Michael Heinisch, who grew up in Poland and Germany and lives in Norway.

For his installation “1.-51. Tagebuch Walter Heinisch (2021)”, Damian Heinisch photographed his grandfather Walter Heinisch's diary from daybreak to sunset in the light of the Norwegian sun.

On densely written pages, Walter Heinisch documented his difficult fate as a forced labourer. Like him, around 400,000 German civilians were deported to the eastern Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the end of the Second World War as so-called ‘reparations deportees’. The conditions in the Soviet labour camps were extremely harsh, with the result that only about half of those affected survived.

Almost eighty years later, his grandson Damian Heinisch travelled to Ukraine to follow in his grandfather's footsteps. He used a plate camera to take colour pictures using the historic autochrome process.

The installation, landscape portraits and historical documents will be on display in the new gallery exhibition on the first floor from 27 September.

Duration of the gallery exhibition: 27 September 2024 to 5 January 2025