Another sculpture by Albin Maria Boniecki – this time entirely symbolic – was a large tortoise. The artist started creating it right after the frog, about which you could read in our previous entry.

The reptile was captured in motion. It has massive, scaly limbs and a head with a pair of convex eyes, turned to the right. The flat shell is covered with a repeating spiral motif. Boniecki used cement in a greenish shade to create the sculpture of the tortoise. Its jaws were painted brown and red, its teeth are yellow, and the eyes are black with a red twinkle. However, the colours used by the artist had no specific meaning, and what really mattered was the hidden symbolism of the animal itself. It was an embodiment of the motto: “work slowly and without enthusiasm, do not hurry, but keep moving so as not to give the capo and the camp crew an excuse to beat you.” Today, the sculpture has a uniform, grayish hue, because the colourful polychrome has irreversibly faded over the years.

Jerzy Kwiatkowski, a prisoner of Majdanek from March 1943 to July 1944, helped Boniecki in choosing the place for the sculpture. At the beginning of his detention in the camp, he was employed as a gardener. Ultimately, the tortoise was placed at the gate of field III on a basis made of limestone rocks and fragments of tombstones from the Jewish cemetery in Lublin (the goal was to protect at least some of them from being completely desecrated). Behind the tortoise, Kwiatkowski planted a row of junipers, and a flowerbed with irises and marigolds in front of it. The area around the sculpture was additionally sown with grass and flowers of the genus clematis. The sculpture was elevated a meter above the ground, which made it very well visible not only to the labour units leaving field III, but also to passers-by from other prisoner fields.

During the occupation, the tortoise – a commonly recognised symbol of slow work – very often appeared on the walls and pavements in the form of drawings. They encouraged the Poles who were forced to work for the enemy to perform disruptive but non-violent acts of defiance, the so-called “minor sabotage.” It was to both support the spirit and to demonstrate social solidarity and resistance against the Third Reich and its activities. This also applied to Majdanek prisoners – the more of them could see the sculpture, the better. As Boniecki himself recalled, he had often seen smiles on the faces looking toward the tortoise.

Until the liquidation of the camp in 1944, the sculpture did not change its location – it was found at the entrance to field III. Currently, it is displayed at the exhibition “Prisoners of Majdanek” in barracks no. 62.