KL Lublin 1944. Epilogue

This exhibition, which Majdanek also describes on its own English page , shows the grounds of the former German concentration camp at Majdanek in the first months after its liberation by the Red Army in July 1944 - one of the earliest documented moments in the site’s history, photographed before it became a subject of systematic historical research.

State Museum at Majdanek on the exhibition:

Collection of carefully selected photographs taken at the former camp grounds taken at Majdanek shortly after the final liquidation of KL Lublin.

What to expect

The exhibition focuses on photographs from the first weeks after the camp’s liberation - frames that captured the outside world’s reaction to the discovery of a site of mass extermination. It is installed near the crematorium, one of the former camp’s most symbolically charged locations.

The curator is Krzysztof Stanek. The museum gives no works count and describes the selection only as a “collection of carefully selected photographs” (its Polish page says “kilkanaście”, meaning a dozen or so). Most of the photographers could not be identified. The known names are three Soviet photographers - Mikhail Trachman, Kuznetsov and Demin - and Stanisław Magierski, a pre-war Lublin photographer. Trachman was a Red Army photographer who documented the Soviet offensive moving west; of Kuznetsov and Demin the museum knows only their surnames and that they served in units of the 1st Belorussian Front.

The prints come mainly from the museum’s own archives. A large part of the material was acquired in the 1990s during research trips to Russian archives. Magierski’s photographs reached the museum as early as the 1940s, given by the photographer himself, and most of his collection was donated by Danuta Magierska in the 1960s.

The museum singles out one frame: taken in the ruins of the burnt-out crematorium in the summer of 1944, it shows Polish soldiers looking at the autopsy table used by the SS doctors.

Captions are bilingual, Polish and English (translation by Łukasz Mrozik). Allow 15 to 20 minutes for the exhibition itself - our estimate; the museum does not publish a time budget for individual displays.

Tickets, opening hours and current information are available on the State Museum at Majdanek’s website .

Context

Majdanek was the first large German concentration camp the Allies reached almost intact: the speed of the Soviet advance in the summer of 1944 left the SS no time to erase the evidence. What the first witnesses saw therefore travelled around the world before any other image of the camps did. A joint Polish-Soviet commission was convened in August 1944 to investigate and document the crimes, and by the autumn, with the war still going on, the grounds had been secured as a museum - the oldest museum in the world commemorating the victims of the Second World War. The photographs in this exhibition were made in exactly that short window, before the history of the place had been written down.

Stanisław Magierski (1904-1957) was a Lublin man, a pharmacist by training and a photographer, painter and poet in practice. He co-founded the Lublin Photographic Society in 1936 and from 1943 served as deputy head of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Home Army’s Lublin District.

Tickets and time

Admission is free. The museum states plainly that this covers all exhibitions and that no entry tickets apply at all. You need no booking and no timed slot - you simply arrive during opening hours.

Hours: April to October 9:00-18:00, last entry to the grounds at 17:00; November to March 9:00-16:00, last entry at 15:00. The museum is closed every Monday and on 1 and 6 January, Easter, Corpus Christi, 11 November and from 24 to 31 December. On 1 November only the car park and the passage to the municipal cemetery are open; all exhibitions are closed that day.

You pay for two things only. Guides: guided tours for individual visitors are given in Polish on Saturdays and Sundays at 11:00 and 14:15, with no prior booking, at 25 PLN standard and 20 PLN reduced per person. Tours in other languages are run by the museum’s guides on request and have to be booked in advance. Parking: entering and parking on the museum grounds costs 10 PLN for a car, 25 PLN for a van, 60 PLN for a coach and 5 PLN for a motorcycle; bicycles go in the racks free of charge.

How long to allow. The museum recommends about three hours for the whole site, because the full route runs almost 5 kilometres and is mostly outdoors - check the forecast and wear proper shoes. “Epilogue” itself is a quarter of an hour; do not travel out here for the exhibition alone, see it as part of a visit to the former camp. Start at the Visitor Service Centre, where staff will explain the route and where you will find maps, the bookshop and the temporary exhibitions. Instead of an audio guide, download the museum’s free app, which carries site descriptions, survivor testimony and archival documents.

English on site: captions on this exhibition are in Polish and English, and the museum publishes its own English page for the show (confirmed live on 14 September 2026). Guided tours for individual visitors are in Polish; English-language tours must be booked in advance. The free app is the practical substitute if you arrive without a booking.

Who it is for and who should skip it. The museum advises against visits by anyone under 14 and does not provide guides for children below the seventh grade of primary school - take that seriously, because the exhibition shows the bodies of victims and the reactions of the first witnesses. Practical notes: there is no cloakroom and no luggage storage, so leave suitcases at the station. Animals are not allowed on the grounds, assistance dogs excepted.

What the press says

• Nasze Miasto Lublin (19.05.2026, Katarzyna Kosowska): the opening was led by curator Krzysztof Stanek, and in the writer’s view the photographs are documentary and at the same time belong to the tradition of classic war photography; the piece also notes that the exhibition is addressed to visitors over 14 - report from Museum Night at Majdanek , in Polish.
• Radio Lublin (16.05.2026): a short notice recording the opening and the subject of the exhibition, with no assessment - Noc Muzeów na Majdanku , in Polish.

Two event reports, both from May 2026. We found no exhibition review.

Updates

• 2026-09-14 - the exhibition is still open; the museum has announced no closing date and still lists it among its current displays (source: Currently at the Museum ).
• 2026-05-16 - premiere of the exhibition during Museum Night (source: event page ).

See also

• Voices That Never Fall Silent - Majdanek’s other temporary exhibition, on view until 30 April 2027; eight biographies of former prisoners, the counterweight to the “after it was over” view that “Epilogue” gives.
• State Museum at Majdanek - the profile, with the permanent exhibitions, the 70 surviving camp structures and how to get there.

Museum profile: State Museum at Majdanek .