Wystawa jubileuszowa CMJW w Łambinowicach-Opolu

70 years has passed since the end of the gehenna of World War II – its atrocities, large-scale destruction and the loss of many millions of people’s lives. Along with the passing of time, the memory of it is fading away, its eye-witnesses are departing forever. It is 50 years ago that the Central Museum of Prisoners-of-War in Łambinowice-Opole was officially instituted (then under the name of Museum of Martyrdom of Prisoners-of-War in Łambinowice), whose mission was to cultivate the remembrance of what had happened years before, of what had entered the pages of history, and – last but not least – of what, despite the lapse of successive years, is a proof of and testifies to those events, as well as to collective and individual vicissitudes of thousands of victims of the global war which changed their lives into a nightmare of captivity and camp reality, barely giving hope for yet another day to come.

This half-a-century’s time of the functioning and development of the Museum as an institution has been – first and foremost – devoted to collecting, elaborating on and rendering available traces of remembrance of events, people, their suffering without words, pain which kept accompanying them, as well as to being a guardian of the non-falsified truth.

The idea of holding a jubilee exhibition which would highlight the essence and specific character of the very institution itself, but primarily – its consistent collecting all sorts of existing and available evidence of the tragedy of war – has not stemmed from a desire to again show an overwhelming drama of the past, but concentrates on a presentation of 51 items of memorabilia which conceal 51 individual histories, 51 voices, 51 traces of people’s activity. Consequently, the objects, documents and photographs selected by the team of Museum employees have been invested with a challenging task to perform – to enliven memories and to become unique monuments of remembrance, since each of them testifies to some wartime experience. Until our times the chosen museum exhibits have retained in themselves a rich knowledge, traces of spiritual life, shreds of emotions. And although the human memory has blurred the sharpness of the detail, we can follow the path of efforts made by the Museum workers towards the participants of the events and try to build a tale woven from single moments, like minute beads, so that we could through their medium come closer to the time which we – as post-war generations – cannot often understand properly or reject without sparing a thought on it, as something remote that does not concern us.

The exhibition includes, among others, a soldier’s shirt sewn in captivity, with the use of some camp linen, a blouse belonging to a participant of the Warsaw Uprising, made of a piece of material which her friend had laid under her head while she was being carried on a stretcher transported with other wounded insurgents, a forage-cap of another Warsaw insurgent, bearing commemorative signatures of his comrades in arms, a gouache painted in an oflag and a drawing made in a stalag by a skilled hand of a Soviet prisoner-of-war, or a German chess handbook translated into Polish by a POW. It also displays picture postcards with a view of Lamsdorf POW camp, a variety of mementos, an exclusive collection of photos by a British POW in Stalag VIII B Lamsdorf, Arthur Weston, who had managed to gather about 300 photographs illustrating the everyday reality in the camp (roll-calls, meals, work), or architectural designs made in captivity. Despite the fact that the participants of those events are invisible – besides the portraits we do not know their faces – this seemingly raw historical material allows us to have a much closer insight into the essence of humanity and insatiable desire to live, irrespective of the conditions which they came to experience. These selected fragments of mute history, episodes from the POWs’ lives and reality, silent sufferance, the will to survive, which hold no room for deceitfulness, offer a peculiar testimony to us. The differentiated historical narration somehow reduces the perspective of looking backwards, in a sense – updates the level of emotions and speaks to us in an easier manner. This is an exhibition of memory which is enlivened, although it does reach us from a different world.

The idea behind the exhibition and its individual exhibits possess great power of persuasion and expression, which is particularly important in the case of a historical influence and educational impact exerted on every young generation. Each of the chosen items contains a chunk of history, whose permanence is hardly possible to establish today: the postcard sent from Starobilsk in December 1939, the unique bracelet made of a POW dog tag, the ring featuring fern, saved from Stalag VIII B (344) Lamsdorf, made of a toothbrush butt, these and many other artefacts displayed on the exhibition, give us a rare chance to comprehend the fact that human distress, desire for freedom and longing for an everyday, quiet life, used to be inseparably connected then with the tragedy of wartime events. Yet despite the ordeal, the need of beauty and looking for it should not be surprising or astonishing, since it is these motives which most probably allowed going through the worst.

The exhibition of 51 museum items does not pretend to recreate the depth of grim wartime events. Nevertheless, by means of its exceptional content, consciously selected artefacts, it minimalizes the perspective of a historical evaluation, thus offering us – visitors – a special and exceptional occasion to reflect not only on the essence of humanity, but also on the value of museum workers’ efforts and the mission of a museum of martyrdom.

Małgorzata Radziewicz