2025 Museum Activities Summary

The year 2025 at the Majdanek Museum was marked by international projects. The exhibition ‘Spaces of the Holocaust’ presented in three countries, exchanges of educators, students and museum professionals, and multilingual educational materials are just some of the activities we held, largely thanks to a grant from the German Foreign Office through the Foundation ‘Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft’ (Remembrance, Responsibility and Future).

Last year, we also completed the first comprehensive renovation of the Mausoleum monument. The cost of the renovation amounted to nearly PLN 8.5 million. In addition, we carried out conservation work on 23,677 objects. The museum's collection grew by nearly 1,700 items – found on the grounds of the Majdanek Museum, originating from archaeological research conducted in Sobibór and from private individuals – as well as 64 original secret messages written in the Majdanek camp by one of the prisoners.

The Mausoleum Monument, a monumental concrete structure shaped like an urn.

The year 2025 also saw the popularity of meetings, guided walks and thematic lectures. One of our most important events was the international conference "Trains od Death – Railway Transports to German Extermination Camps. Current knowledge and research proposals." It was inaugurated by a debate entitled "40 years after the Shoah. The Holocaust in the light of Claude Lanzmann's documentary." The meeting, attended by representatives of museums, was an opportunity for a joint discussion on expanding the state of knowledge about the logistics of deportation. This goal will also be pursued in a post-conference volume, which is planned for publication this year.

All these activities resulted in an increase in visitor numbers, which exceeded 220,000, and interest in the content we publish. Our posts on social media and on our website reached almost 5 million people. We produced 9 films and 2 podcasts. We also hosted 21 film crews, including those from Japan and Italy.

We have published 17 publications on various topics, including:

The English-language version of Dariusz Libionka's monograph The Extermination of Jews in the General Government
Pulsating Memory – an online publication prepared for the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II
I Survived memoir by Zacheusz Pawlak, a former prisoner of KL Lublin
Einsatz Reinhardt. The Extermination of Jews in the General Government, edited by Tomasz Kranz
The State Museum at Majdanek 1944–2024. An Illustrated History by Agnieszka Kowalczyk-Nowak
No. 3273 was sixteen years old by Jan Michalak – memoirs of a teenage prisoner of Konzentrationslager Lublin and other German concentration camps