Voices That Never Fall Silent

The exhibition is open until 30 April 2027 in the Visitor Service Centre, admission free. The eight people at its centre have one thing in common: they passed through Majdanek and survived. Almost everything else divides them - age, sex, why they were arrested, what they made of the years after liberation. The museum tells each of the eight stories on its own terms rather than folding them into a single collective account.

State Museum at Majdanek on the exhibition:

The central figures of the exhibition include: Danuta Brzosko-Mędryk, Jerzy Kwiatkowski, Stefania Perzanowska, Jadwiga Ankiewicz, Bolesław Burski, Zacheusz Pawlak, Jan Michalak, and Andrzej Stanisławski.

[…]

The main axis of the exhibition consists of the survivors’ biographical profiles, illustrated with photographs from family collections, documents, and excerpts from the accounts they wrote. Display cases present typewritten memoirs as well as camp-related and personal artefacts, such as: medicines, objects made by prisoners in the camp, secret letters, and personal belongings. Mounted screens display video testimonies from specific individuals, as well as material about Dr. Stefania Perzanowska prepared by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.

What to expect

The exhibition brings together eight biographies of very different wartime experiences - from resistance fighters to civilians and teenagers - shown through family keepsakes, documents and video recordings. Descriptions are available in both Polish and English.

It is installed in the Visitor Service Centre, the building where every visit to Majdanek begins. That matters for planning: you can see it without walking out onto the former camp grounds, and if you have come for the whole site, it is on your way in or out.

The display cases hold typewritten memoirs alongside camp-made and personal objects: medicines, things prisoners made inside the camp, secret notes smuggled out, small personal belongings. Family photographs and documents illustrate each biography. Mounted screens play video testimonies of the individual survivors, with a separate film about Dr Stefania Perzanowska produced by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity.

Allow 30 minutes, or an hour if you intend to watch the video testimonies in full. This is an exhibition to read rather than to walk through: eight life stories, a lot of text, no theatrics. It rewards a second visit to Majdanek more than a first. If this is your first time here, walk the historical trail across the camp grounds first and come back to the exhibition at the end, when the eight names already carry weight.

Context

The exhibition opened on 23 August, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes. The date is deliberate: on 23 August 1939 the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow with a secret protocol on partitioning Polish territory. The show is part of the “Remember. 23 August” campaign run by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, whose central figure in 2026 is Stefania Perzanowska.

Perzanowska (1896-1974) was a physician who organised a hospital on the women’s field inside the Majdanek camp and who published her memoir, “Gdy myśli do Majdanka wracają” (“When Thoughts Return to Majdanek”), in 1970. Like the other seven people in the exhibition, she wrote her account down, and it is the written word rather than the object that is the starting point here. The museum publishes these memoirs in print with the Warsaw house Prószyński Media: uncensored, expanded with private photographs, documents and QR codes linking to video testimonies.

Tickets and time

Admission is free. The museum charges nothing to enter the grounds or any of its exhibitions, so you walk into “Voices That Never Fall Silent” with no ticket and no booking. You pay only for a guided tour and for parking. There is no free-day question to ask here: every open day is free.

Opening hours change with the season: April to October 9:00-18:00 (last entry 17:00), November to March 9:00-16:00 (last entry 15:00). The museum is closed every Monday and on 1 and 6 January, Easter, Corpus Christi, 11 November and 24-31 December. 1 November, All Saints’ Day, is a separate case: the museum then opens only the car park and the passage to the municipal cemetery between Tetmajera and Cmentarna streets, and all its buildings and exhibitions stay closed. In 2026 that falls on a Sunday, so do not count on a weekend visit working. The exhibition runs to 30 April 2027, so for most of that time you will be dealing with the short winter day - arrive before 14:00.

A guided tour of the former camp costs 25 PLN (regular) or 20 PLN (reduced). Individual visitors can join without booking on Saturdays and Sundays at 11:00. The museum’s English “Plan Your Visit” page states that the second slot, at 14:15, runs in July and August only, which means that for most of this exhibition’s run 11:00 is the single walk-in time. Its Polish version of the same page gives 11:00 and 14:15 without that qualification; both were checked on 14 September 2026 and the museum’s two language versions contradict each other, so confirm an afternoon tour by telephone before you travel for it. The museum does not state that this route covers the temporary exhibition, so plan to see it on your own.

English on site: the exhibition is captioned in Polish and English throughout, which the museum states explicitly. The museum’s free visitor app, offered on its English-language pages, covers the camp grounds rather than this exhibition. Guided tours are offered in English, German, Spanish, Russian and Belarusian, but only by advance booking through the museum’s guide reservation form ; the walk-in weekend tours are Polish only.

Three practical points. The museum has no cloakroom and no luggage storage, so travel light or leave your bag at Lublin’s main railway or bus station. Because of the nature of the site, the museum does not recommend a visit for anyone under 14. The Visitor Service Centre that houses the exhibition is wheelchair accessible, with an adapted toilet, a tactile map of the grounds and an induction loop at the information desk and in the bookshop.

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

What the press says

No English-language coverage of this exhibition has appeared. Both items below are Polish.

• Radio Lublin (23.08.2026, RyK / opr. PaW): a photo report from the opening that walks the reader through the show by way of the written memoirs rather than the objects, and recounts the story of Jan Michalak, sent to the camp at 16 - Radio Lublin’s report .
• Wszystko co Najważniejsze (23.08.2026, PAP/MB): the Polish Press Agency dispatch from the opening, which notes that the museum deliberately takes the eight biographies outside the camp and shows these people before the war and after liberation - the PAP dispatch .

Both are opening reports. As of mid-September 2026 no arts publication had reviewed the exhibition, so there is no critical verdict to relay either way.

Magdalena Petruk, co-author of the exhibition, explained its premise at the opening: “We have also placed them in the broader context of their biographies - how they lived before the war and after liberation - so as not to perpetuate their image solely as victims of Majdanek.” (the museum’s report from the opening )

See also

• KL Lublin 1944. Epilogue - Majdanek’s other temporary show, photographs of the camp grounds in the first months after liberation; you can see both in one visit.
• State Museum at Majdanek - the permanent exhibition “Prisoners of Majdanek” in barrack 62 tells individual inmates’ stories and is the natural continuation of this one.
• Pod Zegarem Martyrdom Museum - the former Gestapo building in central Lublin, which completes the picture of the German terror in the city from which people were sent to Majdanek.

Museum profile: State Museum at Majdanek .