On our 80th jubilee last year we held the “Mementos” campaign, during which we appealed for donating the objects connected with Majdanek’s history to the museum collections. Thanks to your engagement they have been enriched with over 300 artefacts, photographs, and documents.

We are going to use them primarily in our educational and history promoting projects. We have already put on display some of the donated artefacts on our “Mementos” exhibition that has proven very popular among the visitors.

Among the received objects there are a.o. two chests – one contained linen transport bags used typically by the German troops. The other belonged to Else Ledermann – a German Jewish woman from Gotha, who was deported to the ghetto in Bełżyce in May 1942 together with her sister Gertrud. Neither women survived the war.

The museum collections were also enriched with an aluminium cigarette case that belonged to Mikołaj Peim. As prisoner no. 4158 he was detained at Majdanek from August 1943. This extraordinary object was gifted to him by some fellow prisoners, who engraved Peim’s initials, the characteristic camp infrastructure, and a tower with the emblem of Dorohusk – Peim’s hometown. In April 1944 Mikołaj was transferred to KL Dachau, where he was eventually liberated.

Jerzy Bargielski – another Pole, who also lived to see his liberation day, was imprisoned in several camps. The Germans arrested him in April 1940. He went through KL Dachau, KL Gusen, and in December 1942 he was deported to Majdanek. In this camp he was actively engaged in the resistance and operated as a liaison to Delegation of the Polish Government in Exile. Jerzy remained at Majdanek until the final day of its functioning: on 22 July 1944 he left the camp in the last evacuation transport – a death march to Auschwitz. He escaped en-route, when the column stopped overnight in Kraśnik. The rich donated collection of Jerzy’s mementos include his photographs, his portrait created at Majdanek in 1942, and over 50 letters exchanged with his family both officially and secretly.

Another extremely valuable addition included the mementos of Henryk Wieliczański (actual name Izaak Halpern). He was a physician, a Home Army soldier, and a prisoner of three German camps – Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Flossenbürg. In the accounts of the fellow inmates he was described as a devoted helper to those in need. During the war, the house of Henryk and Teodozja Wieliczańscy proved to be a shelter to a Jewish woman and a Holocaust survivor named Sara Celnik. The couple received the Righteous Among the Nations title granted by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. The medal and a special diploma confirming that fact have also been donated to our collections. The document is presented on the “Mementos” exhibition.

New archivals include some photographs taken on the former camp grounds back in 1944, digital copies of almost 50 secret letters sent from KL Lublin by Jerzy Wróbel vel Nowak, photos and a testimony of Robert Eisenstadt, who escaped from Majdanek in July 1942, and the original manuscript of the account written by Czesław Skoraczyński. We hope that his book entitled “Żywe numery” [Living Numbers] will soon join the other accounts available in our bookstore.

We wish to express our utmost gratitude to everyone, who participated in the “Mementos” campaign and donated invaluable items to the museum collections. Thanks to your decision they will not only be properly secured for the future generations, but we will also make every effort to turn them into living echoes of history that through exhibitions and books shall carry the stories of their owners from the World War II era. We relentlessly appeal to everyone that might poses any camp-related objects, to contact our staff, and aid is in the mission of cultivating the memory of Majdanek.