News

To our Department of Collections and Conservation the last year was a time of intensive development and expansion of the collections, as well as one of hard work on securing the evidence of POWs’ fates. In total, the collections of our Museum increased by 803 new items, of which as many as 700 were obtained through donations. The growth of the collections was followed by widespread conservation works carried out on 3077 items altogether.

The most numerous group of the new acquisitions was made up by items of POWs’ correspondence (the collection of philately expanded by 326 new objects) and photographs (272 new objects). Among the mementos special attention should be paid to objects bearing a high degree of emotional load, like the family archive of Capt. Edward Mamunow – the precursor of Lieutenant Zawistowski of the movie Eroica – or the unique badge of the Home Army made of a can at Stalag 344 Lamsdorf. The last year also enriched the collections with new mementos obtained from families of British and Canadian POWs, including the diary of Capt. Herman C. Keys and some issues of the camp magazine The Prisoner of War. The other items were purchased (57 objects) or were found during the archaeological research conducted in the Old POW Cemetery in Łambinowice – within the framework of the project entitled “Lamsdorf/Łambinowice. Archaeology of memory”.

In turn, as far as the statutory tasks are concerned, there have been 102 museal items restored in a complex way and the preventive conservation was applied in the case of nearly 3000 objects, mainly belonging to the collections of photographs and philately. Parallel to the above-mentioned works, the Department ran advanced digitalization, creating digital images of nearly 1400 objects and elaborating on almost 1900 entries in the Databased Management System MUZA.

The activity of the Department’s employees was not limited to the storerooms and studios only. They also carried out a great deal of fieldwork – first of all at the Site of National Remembrance, where they took care of the remains of the camps and the military cemeteries and beyond. The year 2025 was rich in research and popular- scientific activity. Texts dealing with the collections of the Museum were published in The Łambinowice Museum Yearly and in prestigious scientific journals such as Journal of Field Archaeology. The work on the series of film miniatures entitled “…, yet it is a different story” was continued and interviews with post-witnesses were prepared.