Duszniki’s passports in Schengen

From 10^th May to 10^th June, an exhibition entitled Passports of the Nations of the European Union is on show at the European Museum in Schengen. This Luxembourg village is widely associated with the waning of the age of the passport, which gives the presentation of our exhibition a particular tenor.

Participants in the official opening, which took place on 10^th May, included Bartosz Jazłowiecki, the Republic of Poland’s Ambassador to Luxembourg; Robert Goebbels, who, as Luxembourg’s Minister of Foreign Affairs during the 1980s, signed the famous Schengen agreement on behalf of his state; Roger Weber, Mayor of Schengen; Professor Marek Safjan, judge at the European Court of Justice; Bartłomiej Ostrowski, Director of the Department of Foreign Cooperation and International Projects at the Chief Executive’s Office of the Lower Silesian Voivodship; Martina Kneip, Director of the European Museum itself; and Jan Bałchan, creator of the exhibition and the Papermaking Museum’s representative.

The Passports of the Nations of the European Union exhibition consists of several parts. On display in the first are historical travel documents gifted to the Papermaking Museum two years ago by collector Andzrej Mazur. The second part comprises not only contemporary sample passports from every nation within the European Union, made available by the Warsaw-based Headquarters of the Border Guard, but also an exhibition of Polish border guard uniforms loaned by the Sudeten Division of the Border Guard in Kłodzko. The exhibition is further enriched by an exposition of contemporary passport-making techniques presented by Polish Security Printing Works S.A., which produces travel documents for several countries.

Maciej Szymczyk

Director, Museum of Papermaking