Home Army Museum

What to expect

A Vickers E tank, the fuselage of a Halifax bomber and a section of a V-2 rocket stand under the glass roof of an Austrian fortress depot built in 1911. That is the first thing you see, and it sets the scale. The subject is the Polish Underground State: a clandestine administration, court system and army that ran in parallel with German rule for five years, on a scale nothing else in occupied Europe matched. Most of the 8,000 objects and 12,000 archival items came from veterans and their families, in Poland and in exile.

The route starts with the defeat of September 1939 and works through intelligence, sabotage and partisan warfare to what happened to Home Army soldiers after 1944: interrogations, show trials, sentences. A reconstructed Stalinist-era prison cell closes the exhibition, and it lands harder than any of the weapons in the cases. Among the personal objects are the diary of Major Henryk Dobrzański “Hubal” and a uniform of General Tadeusz Komorowski “Bór”; off to one side hangs Tadeusz Kantor’s collage “September 1939”.

This is a text-heavy museum. Short films punctuate each section, but panels and captions carry the weight. If you have just come from Schindler’s Factory expecting the same cinematic staging, several rooms here will read as encyclopaedic. If the occupation and the resistance are why you came to Krakow, two hours will not be enough. Children under about ten will be lost.

Tips

• Arrive by 16:00 at the latest. Last entry and ticket sales stop 60 minutes before closing, so at 16:30 you will be turned away even though the doors are still open.
• Labels are bilingual on much of the route, but not all of it. Visitors report gaps in the English captions, particularly downstairs; the museum’s object app fills some of them. Download it before you go, and bring your phone torch - the lower floor is deliberately dark and the captions there are hard to read even in Polish.
• Sunday is free and therefore the busiest day. Admission to the exhibitions costs nothing every Sunday during opening hours. For empty rooms come Tuesday or Wednesday morning instead: 25 PLN standard, 15 PLN reduced, 45 PLN family.
• An English guide is worth it here. Tours cost 250 PLN in English or German (200 PLN in Polish) plus admission, booked in advance on 12 410 07 96. Split between four or more people it is the difference between reading panels and following an argument.
• Don’t miss the hardware and the cell. The tank, the Halifax fuselage and the V-2 section are visible from the entrance; the post-war interrogation cell is the part you will not find in the city’s other occupation museums.
• Skip the temporary exhibition ticket unless the current show is specifically of interest - a separate 15 PLN (8 PLN reduced) and about half an hour.
• Practicalities: photography without flash is allowed, self-service lockers take luggage of most sizes, the building is step-free and wheelchairs are lent free of charge. Note also that the museum’s website flags a temporary relocation of the main entrance, with no end date - worth a check before you set out.

Getting there

On foot from the main station. Ul. Wita Stwosza runs along the eastern side of Kraków Główny, under 500 m from the platforms - ten minutes with a suitcase, less without. No other museum in the city is this well placed for a spare morning before a train, and the lockers make that practical.

By tram. The nearest hub is Rondo Mogilskie, about eight minutes on foot to the north-west. The Dworzec Główny stops serve the same area from the city-centre side.

From the Main Square. A 25-minute walk: up Floriańska, across the Planty park ring and under the railway viaduct towards Rakowicka.

By car. No car park at the museum, and one reserved accessible space. Drivers use the Galeria Krakowska garage or the private car parks on Rakowicka.

Nearby

• MuFo Rakowicka, the Museum of Photography at ul. Rakowicka 22A, 300 m away. A complete change of register after two hours of war, and the two make one afternoon with no travel in between.
• Pomorska Street , the former Gestapo headquarters, where prisoners’ inscriptions survive on the cell walls. The same occupation seen from the victims’ side rather than the conspirators’; under an hour.
• The Czartoryski Museum , a 15-minute walk towards the Old Town, if you want the day to end with Leonardo rather than with a prison cell.

Background

The building went up in 1911 as a command and supply structure of the Krakow Fortress, the Austrian ring of works that still leaves brick remnants scattered across the city. The museum dates from 2000, formed around a collection Home Army veterans had been assembling since the late 1980s, and opened on 27 September 2000.

The 2009-2011 rebuild cost roughly 30 million PLN: the courtyard was roofed in glass to a design by Ryszard Jurkowski and the brick facade restored, work that drew a Brick Award nomination and a place in the Polish architecture review of 2011.

The museum’s patron, General Emil Fieldorf “Nil”, ran the Home Army’s sabotage command and was executed by the communist authorities in 1953 after a rigged trial. His biography traces the same arc as the exhibition: from the underground to a post-war death sentence.