The Deportation Museum is a place of remembrance, dedicated to the memory of the victims of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. It was inaugurated in 2002 in Figline, near Prato, thanks to the tireless work and testimony of a number of local survivors who are part of the National Association of Ex-Deportees (ANED) and the support of the Municipality of Prato, in the firm conviction of having created a place that can contribute to the cultural and civic growth of citizens, both young and old.
It is based on a WWII event, when Tuscan workers were arrested by Nazis for taking part in a general strike in March 1944 and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and to other subcamps. The Museum also remembers the millions of men and women, victims of Nazi raids all over Europe, who were deported for political and racial reasons according to the policy of enslavement and annihilation of entire populations put in place in the Third Reich. The exhibition is conceived as a symbolic journey to a Nazi concentration camp.
Some of the objects on display are original, from the camps and from the factories housed in tunnels dug by the prisoners themselves. Others are replicas made by the few survivors, who felt the need, after their return to Prato, to bear witness to the atrocities they had endured in the concentration camps and to the terrible conditions of their slave labour. The Museum, which has been credited since 2012 with "regional significance, "has a modern audio-visual museum exhibition entitled "THROUGH MY EYES - voices and faces of survivors of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps", consisting of 7 video stations, with direct audio transmission through the headphones given to the visitors. In these films, witnesses - Jews who survived the genocide and political deportees, mostly from Tuscany, but also Sinti and Romani people, homosexuals and Jehovah witnesses - tell the story of their deportation.