There are places that survive time because they preserve a choice. Like that of Oskar Schindler, for example, who in the darkness of the Holocaust decided to save lives rather than lose them. In the old textile factory of Brněnec, he welcomed thousands of Jews pretending to employ them in war production to save them from deportation to the extermination camps. Precisely for this reason, his factory is remembered as "the factory of life". Today that space has been reborn as Schindler's Arks Memorial Museum - Museum of Survivors, inaugurated on May 10, 2025 with a two-day multidisciplinary festival of music, art, theater and testimonies. The initiative was conceived and led by Daniel Low-Beer, heir to the founding family of the factory, who chose to build the museum starting from the suggestions left by hundreds of young students visiting over the years, in a process of listening, openness and co-creation.

In this context, an emblematic and powerful choice takes shape: the inclusion of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Terzo Paradiso as a permanent work of the Memorial. The symbol has been integrated into the architecture of the former factory through an installation that uses the metal containers once used for raw wool. On each cylinder, now, rests a disk in which the name of a survivor is engraved, illuminated from within. The light – in a physical and spiritual sense – thus restores dignity and presence to the names, transforming the material into living memory. A composition that not only reflects the trinamic vision of the master, but reinterprets the function of the Terzo Paradiso as an active sign of testimony and future.

The installation was created in collaboration with Saverio Teruzzi, coordinator of the Rebirth/Terzo Paradiso Ambassadors, and presented to the public as part of the exhibition Starting at Zero, curated by the two Bauhaus artists Widar Halén and Magdalena Droste. As Teruzzi explains, “Daniel Low-Beer, the promoter of the initiative, after learning about the project in Geneva and visiting Cittadellarte, chose to include the Third Paradise inside the Memorial. He accepted the suggestion of using containers of raw wool - similar to bullet casings - on which backlit disks with the names of the survivors were placed".

Teruzzi continues, underlining the profound meaning of this presence: “In Brněnec, among the ruins of Schindler's factory, the Pistoletto Foundation has traced the sign of the Third Paradise as a gesture of memory and future. A tribute to the survivors of Schindler's Ark, but also a symbolic act aimed at a humanity that knows how to choose preventive peace: a peace that is built before the conflict, through art, awareness and responsibility. In a time that continues to be marked by war and violence, we felt an even more urgent need to affirm, precisely in that place, the possibility of a rebirth”. Therefore, the presence of the Third Paradise within a Holocaust memorial is the confirmation that art, when it takes on the responsibility of memory, can become a bridge between generations, a gesture of peace, a shared reflection.