Pod Zegarem Martyrdom Museum

Practical info

What to expect

The museum, which calls itself The Museum of Martyrdom “Under the Clock” in English, occupies the cellars of an office block in Lublin, the largest city of eastern Poland. The building was completed in 1930 for the regional land office: three storeys, a basement and a clock on the facade that gave the address its nickname. In January 1940 the German security police took it over and the Gestapo became its dominant tenant. Interrogation rooms were set up on the ground and upper floors, while the cellars became a detention block for political prisoners: twelve cells, two lightless cells, a punishment cell, a store room and a guardroom.

Those cellars are what visitors walk through today. Most cells measured 340 by 279 by 238 cm; one of the dark cells was just 75 cm wide. Windows were boarded over inside and banked up with earth outside, cell doors gave way to bars, light fittings were removed and the central heating was left switched off. Interrogations began around nine in the morning, the Gestapo questioned some fifty people a day, and the screams carried through the thick walls. An estimated two hundred people were killed in the building between 1942 and 1944.

The branch opened on 23 September 1979 at the initiative of former political prisoners of Lublin Castle and Under the Clock; the cellars were refurbished and a new display installed in 2017. The holdings centre on prisoners’ correspondence: smuggled notes and postcards from the castle prison, from this detention block and from the camps that followed, along with secret letters written in urine by women held at Ravensbrück. A second exhibition space belonging to the branch, at Radziszewskiego 4, houses Girls in KL Ravensbrück, on the seventy-four Polish women subjected to pseudo-medical experiments there.

Tips

The branch opens Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 to 17:00, and is closed on Sundays, Mondays and on 15 August. Admission is 10 PLN full price and 8 PLN reduced, and the ticket desk takes cash only, which is worth knowing before you arrive. A handful of free-admission days are set each month; in August 2026 they fall on the 7th, 13th, 18th and 26th.

A guided visit costs 35 PLN on top of the admission tickets, a museum lesson 40 PLN and a workshop 45 PLN, all of them arranged in advance through the branch on +48 81 533 36 78 or at zegar@mnwl.pl. Photography inside is permitted for private use only, with no right of publication, and flash, additional lighting and tripods are forbidden. The museum publishes no suggested visiting time, so allow for the two addresses separately if you want to see both parts of the branch.

Getting there

The museum is at ul. Uniwersytecka 1, 20-029 Lublin, in the Śródmieście district, with the branch’s second exhibition a few minutes away at ul. Radziszewskiego 4. Both sit inside Lublin’s compact centre, within walking distance of Krakowskie Przedmieście, the main pedestrian axis. The museum lists no bus or trolleybus numbers and says nothing about parking, so plan your approach to the street address itself.

Nearby museums

The obvious companion is Lublin Castle and the National Museum in Lublin, the parent institution and the prison that supplied many of the detainees questioned here. The story continues at the State Museum at Majdanek on the city’s edge, while pre-war Lublin is shown at the Museum of the History of the City of Lublin in the Kraków Gate.