State Museum at Majdanek

Practical info

What to expect

Majdanek lies within Lublin, the largest city of eastern Poland, about 170 kilometres south-east of Warsaw. The State Museum at Majdanek was created here on 11 November 1944, while the war was still being fought, on part of the grounds of KL Lublin, a German Nazi concentration and extermination camp. It is the oldest museum in the world commemorating the victims of the Second World War. Between 1941 and 1944 close to 80 thousand people died in the camp, above all Jews, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Russians. Seventy structures built by the Germans still stand on the site: prisoner barracks, camp workshops and storehouses, the quarters of the SS garrison, the bath barracks, the gas chamber bunker and the crematorium.

The visit is above all a walk through that authentic ground, along a historical trail titled Konzentrationslager Lublin 1941-1944, whose panels in Polish, English and Hebrew combine facts with wartime photographs and survivor testimony. Several buildings are open. Barracks 41 and 42 held the bath houses; next to them stands the gas chamber bunker where, in 1942 and 1943, the camp SS murdered Jews and prisoners of other nationalities. Barrack 52 holds the shoes of victims of Operation Reinhardt, found at Majdanek in the summer of 1944; barrack 55 carries an exhibition on that operation. The permanent exhibition The Prisoners of Majdanek, in barrack 62, follows individual fates, while barrack 44 covers Lublin under German occupation. The crematorium, set on fire by the retreating SS on 22 July 1944, has been partly reconstructed; the furnaces and the autopsy table remain inside.

Holding the site together is the Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom: the Gate-Monument at the entrance, the Mausoleum with the ashes of the murdered at the far end, and the Road of Homage and Remembrance running between them. Nearby stands the Column of Three Eagles, built by prisoners in the spring of 1943. The museum also runs a prisoner records database, the Digital Majdanek portal and the Varia magazine, and it administers the memorial sites at Bełżec and Sobibór.

Tips

Admission to the museum and to every exhibition is free, and visiting on your own requires neither a ticket nor a booking. From April to October the grounds are open 9:00-18:00, with the last entry at 17:00; from November to March the hours are 9:00-16:00, with the last entry at 15:00. The museum is closed every Monday and on Polish public holidays, including 1 and 6 January, Easter, Corpus Christi, 11 November and the period from 24 to 31 December.

Allow around three hours. The full route runs almost 5 kilometres and lies mostly in the open, so check the forecast before you set out. Start at the Visitor Service Centre for maps and route advice; the museum’s free mobile application then guides you through the site with witness accounts, archival photographs and documents. Guided tours are the one paid service: 25 PLN regular, 20 PLN reduced. Individual visitors can join a Polish-language tour without booking on Saturdays and Sundays at 11:00, and from 1 July to 28 August daily except Mondays, also at 14:15; tours in other languages are arranged in advance. There is no cloakroom or luggage store, and the museum advises against visits by anyone under fourteen.

Getting there

The museum is at ul. Droga Męczenników Majdanka 67, 20-325 Lublin, in the Dziesiąta district. City buses reach it from the centre of Lublin in a little over ten minutes; the nearest stop to the entrance gate is called Majdanek. You may drive onto the grounds, where there is a large car park, for a single charge of 10 PLN for a car, 25 PLN for a minibus, 60 PLN for a coach and 5 PLN for a motorcycle. Bicycles can be left free of charge in the racks. Since 7 April 2026 the side entrances from ul. Cmentarna and ul. Tetmajera have been closed.

Nearby museums

Majdanek pairs naturally with the Pod Zegarem Martyrdom Museum, devoted to the victims of German terror in central Lublin, and with the Brama Grodzka - Teatr NN Centre, which keeps the memory of Jewish Lublin. Further south, the Museum and Memorial Site in Bełżec is a branch of the Majdanek museum and marks the Operation Reinhardt death camp whose traces you see in barrack 52.