News

The recent Łambinowice Museum Meeting was devoted to one of the monuments that – at first look – do not attract especial attention, yet – upon a closer inspection – reveal an unusual history. The hero of the meeting was a small copy of The New Testament found in the attic of a house in Sowin, a village situated near Łambinowice.

The history of the book was presented by Piotr Jędorowicz of the Department of Collections and Conservation of the Central Museum of Prisoners of War. The presentation was not only one of a historical exhibit, but also a story of a historian’s work, who – on the basis of a single dedication written on a page gone yellow is able to recreate fates of concrete persons and events that occurred more than eighty years earlier. It is thanks to many-month archival queries, analyses of sources and contacts made also outside Poland’s borders that it was possible to confirm the fact that the Bible found in the attic had belonged to British POWs detained in Stalag VIII B (344) Lamsdorf.

The June meeting proved that work of the Department is not limited to collecting and elaborating on museum items. Each object offers a starting point for further research, and at times also for asking new questions. In the case of The Holy Bible found in Sowin it was not only possible to identify its owners, but also recreate a fragment of the activity of Anglican chaplain Richard Wingfield-Digby. At the turn of 1940 and 1941, he requested to be transferred to Lamsdorf to exercise his clergyman’s service among the British privates detained in the camp. He brought with him copies of The Bible which became evidence of the religious and spiritual dimension of the life in the camp.

The tale told by our colleague reminds that museum collections are not items in a lifeless storehouse of objects. Each monument, small as it is, can hide a history of a person, or sometimes even of a few people, whose vicissitudes crisscross on pages of one document or a book. Museologists’ task is to detect these histories, order them and restore the people or events they carry to memory. The June Łambinowice Museum Meeting was just such an attempt at extracting a tale written between pages of a seemingly common copy of The New Testament from the past.