State Museum at Majdanek

What to expect

Majdanek is not hidden away in a forest. The Lublin concentration camp memorial sits on a main road at the south-eastern edge of the city; one travel writer remembers not believing they had arrived. Beyond the gate, guard towers and rows of barracks spread across roughly 90 hectares of what was KL Lublin, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp. About 130 thousand people were deported here and close to 80 thousand died, above all Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians.

Soviet troops reached the camp on the night of 22 to 23 July 1944, after the SS had fled too fast to destroy it. The museum was founded on 11 November that year, with the war still on. That makes it the oldest museum in the world commemorating the victims of the Second World War. Visitors who know other camp sites say Majdanek is the harder one to take, because so little of it had to be rebuilt.

Distances shape the visit more than anything else. The full route is close to 5 kilometres: about 15 minutes on foot from the Visitor Service Centre to barrack 62, another 20 from there to the crematorium, and then the walk back. If your time or energy is limited, make barrack 62 your first priority. Its main exhibition, The Prisoners of Majdanek, follows camp life through the lives of 33 named people and gives you the frame for everything else.

Barrack 52 comes next. It holds shoes the SS took from Jews killed at Majdanek and in the death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, found on the site in the summer of 1944. A fire in August 2010 destroyed one barrack and more than seven thousand pairs of prisoners’ shoes, yet what remains still fills the room.

Towards the far end stands the crematorium, which the fleeing SS set alight on 22 July 1944. It has been partly rebuilt, and the furnaces and the dissection table are still inside. Roses now grow outside it, on ground where human ashes were once mixed into the soil. Behind it is the Mausoleum, an urn-shaped roof over a mound of victims’ ashes heaped up in 1947.

The Mausoleum is one end of the Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom by Wiktor Tołkin and Janusz Dembek, unveiled on 21 September 1969. The Road of Homage and Remembrance connects it to the Gate-Monument by the main road, which you pass when you arrive. This is where flowers are laid, and the only place where a candle may be lit. Open fire and smoking, e-cigarettes included, are banned everywhere else.

With time to spare, open the doors in between. Barracks 41 and 42 were the bath houses for men and women, where prisoners were washed and disinfected. In the gas chamber bunker next to them the SS murdered Jews, and not only Jews, in 1942 and 1943; the door still has the peephole the guards watched through.

Barracks 14 and 15 show how prisoners were housed, barrack 55 is devoted to Operation Reinhardt, and barrack 44 to Lublin under German occupation. Barrack 47 holds Shrine, an art installation by Tadeusz Mysłowski opened in 1999. Prisoners built the Column of Three Eagles in the spring of 1943. Albin Maria Boniecki proposed the project so that exhausted inmates could be kept on light work out of sight.

The museum does not recommend a visit for anyone under 14, and its guides do not take children below the seventh grade. Respect that. Do not squeeze Majdanek into a spare hour between other sights either. If the German occupation and the Holocaust are why you came to Lublin, come here first and keep the rest of the day free.

Tips

• Budget three hours and good shoes. Three hours is the museum’s own estimate for a visit on your own. Nearly all of the route is outdoors with no shade, on gravel, concrete and wood, so bring water in summer and warm layers in winter.
• English is everywhere on the trail. The historical trail Konzentrationslager Lublin 1941-1944 has panels in Polish, English and Hebrew, with wartime photographs and witness accounts. The bookshop at the Visitor Service Centre sells an English guidebook and site plan. The museum’s free app adds an interactive map and survivor testimony, and it works offline.
• There is no ticket to buy. The grounds and every exhibition are free, and a self-guided visit needs no booking. Money changes hands only for a guide and for parking.
• Book an English-speaking guide a week ahead. A group of up to 10 pays 300 PLN for a tour in a foreign language (150 PLN in Polish); up to 30 people pay 500 PLN (300 PLN in Polish). Tours last about 2.5 hours and are also offered in German, Spanish, Russian and Belarusian.
• Walk-up tours are in Polish only. They cost 25 PLN (20 PLN reduced) and start at the Visitor Service Centre on Saturdays and Sundays at 11:00; arrive 15 minutes early. In July and August they also run on weekdays except Monday. The museum also announces a 14:15 slot on its home page, but the tours page does not list it and the English page ties it to July and August. Confirm on +48 81 710 28 33 before planning around it.
• Check the calendar and the route. Besides Mondays, the site is shut on 1 and 6 January, at Easter, on Corpus Christi, on 11 November and from 24 to 31 December. On All Saints’ Day, 1 November, only the car park and the path to the municipal cemetery stay open. Conservation of the Gate-Monument is planned to run until June 2028, and the museum warns that the route may change at times, so ask at the Visitor Service Centre what is open that day.
• Leave your luggage in town. The museum has no cloakroom and no left-luggage room. Lublin’s main railway station, the bus station and the tourist information offices have left-luggage facilities.
• Wheelchair access is partial. The Visitor Service Centre and barrack 62 are step-free, and barracks 43, 44 and 52 have ramps. Concrete and metal ramps also lead into the bath houses in barracks 41 and 42 and into the gas chamber bunker. For the other barracks the museum lends portable rails on three days’ notice. The crematorium and the Mausoleum are out of reach for wheelchairs. You can get close to the Gate-Monument, but steep steps keep you off its platform. Wheelchairs are lent free, but no Polish Sign Language interpreter works on site.

Getting there

Public transport: get off at the stop called Majdanek, the nearest to the entrance gate. Trolleybus 158 (Zana ZUS - Felin) runs there via Ogród Saski and Al. Racławickie, and the trip from central Lublin takes a little over ten minutes.

By car: set your navigation to ul. Droga Męczenników Majdanka 67 or 51°13'31.0"N, 22°36'22.3"E. Drive onto the grounds and use the large car park. The one-off fee is 10 PLN for a car, 5 PLN for a motorcycle, 25 PLN for a minibus and 60 PLN for a coach.

Do not aim for the side gates on ul. Cmentarna or ul. Tetmajera; they have been closed since 7 April 2026. Bays for drivers with disabilities are at the entrance gate, behind the Visitor Service Centre, outside the administration building and at the Mausoleum.

By bicycle: lock it at the free racks on the grounds.

Nearby

Back in the city centre, the Pod Zegarem Martyrdom Museum tells the urban half of the same story: twelve basement cells of the former Gestapo remand prison at Uniwersytecka 1, about an hour’s visit.

To see who Operation Reinhardt wiped out, go to the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre , whose 75-minute guided exhibition Lublin. Memory of the Place brings back the Jewish town. The Majdanek museum also runs the Museum and Memorial Site in Bełżec , an Operation Reinhardt death camp further south and the origin of some of the shoes in barrack 52.