Pod Zegarem Martyrdom Museum

What to expect

The Under the Clock Museum in Lublin is a former Gestapo jail in the cellar of a university building. Upstairs, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University teaches law and administration; downstairs are the cells where people waited to be interrogated between 1940 and 1944. Look up at the clock on the facade before you go in. Its dial and mechanism date from the 1930s, and it gave the place its name.

Come knowing that this is not an intact prison. The cellars began as boiler rooms and coal stores, were rebuilt more than once after 1944, and four of the former cells still belong to the army. What you can enter are two cells with prisoners’ inscriptions, a reconstructed cell and dark cell, and rooms of documents and personal belongings of the castle prisoners. The narrowest dark cell was just 75 cm wide.

The walls are what people remember. According to the regional news site naszemiasto.pl, prisoners scratched messages into the plaster with fingernails and bits of wire while they waited, among them “God, do not abandon us” and “Mum, I love you”. The 2015-2017 refit set out to recover as many of these as possible from under later plaster and paint, and added multimedia to the display.

It suits adults and teenagers from around 14, and it belongs in the plan of anyone visiting Majdanek or Lublin Castle. Leave small children with someone else; nothing here is toned down. Architecture enthusiasts should know that the visit is the cellar only.

Tips

• Cash only, and it is not free. Tickets cost 10 PLN full price and 8 PLN reduced, and the desk does not take cards. Ignore the city portal lublin.eu, which still says admission is free.
• Use the Polish page, not the English one. The museum’s English visit page is years out of date: it still promises free entry, prices lessons at PLN 40 and asks you to wear a COVID mask. For current opening hours and this month’s free-entry days, check the Polish branch page . The museum opens Tuesday to Saturday only.
• Book a guide, and ask about English. A guided tour costs 70 PLN on top of admission; a museum lesson is 80 PLN plus 7 PLN per participant, a workshop 100 PLN plus 10 PLN per participant. The English page mentions tours in English on request, but the site never says what language the labels are in, so phone +48 81 533 36 78 or email zegar@mnwl.pl first and otherwise assume Polish.
• Give it 45 to 60 minutes. That is our estimate; the museum publishes none. The route itself takes 15 minutes, the inscriptions take the rest.
• There is a second site 100 m away. “Girls in KL Ravensbruck”, at ul. Radziszewskiego 4, tells the story of 74 young Polish women used for pseudo-medical experiments in the camp. Ask at the desk if it is open and add half an hour.
• Come here before Majdanek. Some of the people held at the castle and in this cellar were later sent on to concentration camps, KL Lublin among them. Seeing the cellar first changes how you read the camp.
• Photos for yourself only. No publication rights, no flash, no extra lighting, no tripods.
• Accessibility: call first. The museum publishes no accessibility information, and the exhibition is underground. The institution’s “Museum without barriers” statement covers the castle hill and says nothing about this building.

Getting there

The museum is in Srodmiescie, the city centre, at the western end of Krakowskie Przedmiescie, the main pedestrian street, where the university campus begins. If you are staying in or near the Old Town, walk.

• On foot: about 12 minutes from plac Litewski, 20 from the Krakow Gate and 25 from the castle hill, all on central streets.
• Bus and trolleybus: get off at Ogrod Saski 03 (about 300 m) or KUL 02 (about 320 m) on Krakowskie Przedmiescie; Krakowskie Przedmiescie 02 and UMCS 01 are a little further.
• By car: the museum says nothing about parking. Park outside the central streets and walk the last stretch.
• To the second site: ul. Radziszewskiego 4 is one street to the west, about 100 m and two minutes on foot.

Nearby

Pair the visit with Lublin Castle and the National Museum in Lublin . The castle, home of this branch’s parent museum, was also the prison from which detainees were driven to this cellar for interrogation. Tickets there are 20 PLN; set aside about 2.5 hours.

For what came next, go to the State Museum at Majdanek , the camp where some of those questioned on Uniwersytecka ended up. Entry is free; allow three hours. For the city the occupation destroyed, the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Krakow Gate charges the same 10 PLN and has a very different mood.

Background

When it opened in 1930 for the regional land office, the building was a showpiece: three storeys over cellars, central heating, lifts and about 250 staff. Regional press makes the point that this is exactly why the Gestapo wanted it in January 1940. A reinforced-concrete block was far easier to seal off than an old tenement with wooden floors.

The jail ran on a daily shuttle with the castle. In the morning, a horse-drawn van brought prisoners from the castle prison for questioning on the upper floors. At night, the bodies of those beaten to death went back in paper sacks, and the prison doctor was made to record a false cause of death. An estimated 200 people were killed in the building between 1942 and 1944.

The Germans tortured their last prisoners here on 20 July 1944 and pulled out two days later. From September 1944 the NKVD, then the Polish communist security service, reused the same cells until 1946, after which the army took over the building.

Former prisoners of the castle and Under the Clock campaigned for the museum, which opened on 23 September 1979. The Radziszewskiego space followed in 1991, and the current display opened in December 2017. English-language readers may already know the address from James A. Michener’s novel “Poland”, which uses Under the Clock as a setting.