Plastyczne i przestrzenne formy upamiętnienia ofiar byłego KL Lublin na terenie Państwowego Muzeum na Majdanku w latach 1944–1969

Commemorating the victims of the former KL Lublin through art and spatial design at the site of the State Museum in Majdanek in the years 1944–1969 The German concentration camp KL Lublin, commonly known as Majdanek, which operated in the years 1941-1944, was the site of death of at least 78,000 people, including 60,000 people of Jewish origin. When the camp was liberated, establishing a museum in Majdanek and commemorating the victims became an important concern. The latter issue, however, proved far from simple. No models existed for commemorating such sites and the extermination of entire social and ethnic groups; nor did an institution exist that might coordinate the work involved in such a project. The first part of the article presents general information on the form and function of commemorating World War II events, focusing specifically on monuments. It also presents the institutions created to coordinate commemoration projects, such as the National Office for Museums and the Preservation of Monuments established in 1945, the Department of Museums and Monuments of Polish Martyrdom (a unit of the National Office), as well as the Council for the Preservation of Monuments of Struggle and Martyrdom appointed in 1947. All these institutions operating under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and Art, as well as the Ministry itself, left an imprint on the work of the National Museum at Majdanek and the form of commemorating the victims of the former KL Lublin. When in the Museum was being created October 1944, the first monument commemorating those murdered in the camp was already in place. This was the so-called Column of the Three Eagles, built by the prisoners themselves under German orders as a form of decorating the camp; the SS officers could not have foreseen that it would serve a commemorative function after the war. The author of the first postwar spatial design was engineer Romuald Gutt. According to his project presented in 1945, the camp was to be transformed into a “Slavic grove” planted with thousands of trees, where the “peace of nature” would reign. Subsequently, the project was taken over by engineer Alina Scholtzówna. It was never fully implemented due to problems with determining the boundaries of the Museum and the expropriation of former owners of the real estate. As the years passed, the concept of the Museum’s spatial design changed. A new project designed by the Lublin architect Romuald Dylewski proposed the preservation of the maximum authenticity of the former camp at Majdanek: the conservation of the existing structures and the removal of the trees. The unveiling of the Monument of Struggle and Martyrdom on September 21, 1969 completed the work on this project. Dylewski’s well-conceived spatial arrangement as well as the group of memorials co-designed by sculptor W. Tołkin and engineer J. Dembek restored authenticity and dignity to the site after the failed tree-planting project.