On April 19, we celebrated Holocaust Remembrance Day and Day for the Prevention of Crimes Against Humanity, which was established to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

On April 11, 2022, the third meeting of the present Board of the State Museum at Majdanek took place. The session was held at the Museum and Memorial in Sobibór.

On the 80th anniversary of the arrival of the very first transport of Jews from the Podzamcze ghetto in Lublin to the death camp in Bełżec, which initiated the mass extermination programme implemented by the Third Reich under the codename “Einsatz Reinhardt,” we met in the Collegium Iuridicum of the Catholic University of Lublin to restore the memory of those events in the form of a panel discussion.

The first transports of Jewish deportees from the Lublin and Lwów ghettos arrived at the Bełżec extermination camp in Bełżec 80 years ago. These events marked the beginning of operation “Reinhardt.” Within its course the Germans murdered approx. 2,000,000 Jews between the March 1942 and November 1943. We commemorated all the victims of that mass extermination programme during a ceremony held in the Museum and Memorial in Bełżec on March 15.

On night of 16 to 17 March, 1942, the functionaries of the Sicherheitspolizei [German security police] commanded by Hermann Worthoff entered the Podzamcze ghetto in Lublin. From there, they would send 1,000 Jews every following day, cramped inside the freight cars they were sent to the extermination camp in Bełżec.

The panel discussion organised by the State Museum at Majdanek, entitled “Einsatz Reinhardt” in the context of the “final solution to the Jewish question.” Roles and consequences, is going to feature the leading historians specialising in the subject of the Holocaust. The debate is going take place in Collegium Iuridicum of the Catholic University of Lublin, situated at Spokojna 1 Street in Lublin. The event starts at 5 p.m. on March 17.

The Institute of National Remembrance and the State Museum at Majdanek wish to invite everyone for a ceremony held in recognition of the 80th anniversary of the first deportations of Jews to the German extermination camp in Bełżec.

We present the new issue of the “Varia” magazine. The contents include historical outlines, archival photographs, and unique documents pertaining to the mass extermination of Jews in the General Government conducted by the Third Reich in the years 1942-1943 under the codename “Einsatz Reinhardt.”

On the night of 16–17 March, 1942, the German police functionaries initiated the deportations from the ghetto in Lublin. Around 1,000 Jews, entirely oblivious of their fate, were herded into freight cars and sent to the death camp in Bełżec every day. The annihilation of Lublin’s Jewish community was the first step of the enormous extermination programme codenamed “Einsatz Reinhardt.”

CALL FOR PAPERS || We invite historians, scholars, regionalist researches, and students to participate in the academic conference “The infrastructure of operation ‘Reinhardt.’ Sites, sources, research postulates” which will be held in Lublin on May 23-25, 2022.

In 2005, the UN General Assembly established January 27th as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This date refers to the day of Auschwitz-Birkenau camp liberation in 1945 and is an opportunity to commemorate Jewish victims who were murdered by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The Museum and Memorial in Bełżec received constant interest from visitors in 2021. Among them there were students from primary and secondary schools, residents of various regions of Poland, as well as some guests from abroad.

We invite you to read the latest issue of this year's Varia magazine. It is published in the Polish-English language version.

The academic seminar "The Architecture of Crime. The Topography and Infrastructure of the ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ Camps" has ended The online seminar on November 4-5, 2021, was devoted to the logistics and organisation of the genocidal operation in the course of which the Germans established the extermination camps in Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.

Between August 31 and September 3, 2021, the international seminar entitled “From memory of places to the pedagogy of remembrance” took place in the Museum and Memorial in Sobibór.

There is still a need to reflect upon the purpose and methods of educational processes organised in memorial sites of World War II. To create a forum for international dialogue on this matter a seminar “From memory of places to the pedagogy of remembrance“ for educational project leaders that starts today in the Museum and Memorial in Sobibór.

The transmission of the actual museum space into the online domain and employment of digital technologies in reaching out to the recipients are dominant topics within the contemporary museum discourse. Both issues were analysed and discussed during the training course addressed to the museum employees.

Seminars, study stays, and workshops – activities for various groups of recipients will be held in the education facility of the Museum and Memorial in Bełżec that has just been presented to the public and media representatives.

Today is the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of the German Nazi Concentration Camps and Death Camps. We would like to present the story of Szlama Ber Winer. He managed to escape from the extermination camp in Chełmno nad Nerem and gave detailed testimony of mass extermination of people in gas vans in Chełmno. He most probably perished in the death camp in Bełżec.

Fourteen papers and a transcript of two interdisciplinary debates – publication edited by Tomasz Kranz “Historia w przestrzeniach pamięci. Obozy – ‘miejsca po’ – muzea” has just been issued. It’s the third volume in the series devoted to martyrology museums that has been published in last years by the State Museum at Majdanek. It is a result of an academic conference held in 2019, on the 75th anniversary of the Museum.

A new edition of Dariusz Libionka’s, The Extermination of Jews in the General Government in the German language is a fruit of cooperation between the State Museum at Majdanek and the Metropol Verlag publishing house.

On May 18, International Museum Day is celebrated all across the globe. This holiday was established in 1977 by the International Council of Museums (ICOM).

Clara Kramer was born in 1927 in Zolkiew as Klara Schwarz. She was the first child of Salka (née Reitzfeld) and Meir Schwarz. Her younger sister Mania was born in 1928.

We are pleased to announce that on May 5 the Museum and Memorial in Sobibór and the Museum and Memorial in Bełżec will become again available to visitors.