Museum and Memorial Site in Sobibór

Practical info

What to expect

The Museum and Memorial Site in Sobibór stands on the ground of a German Nazi extermination camp that operated in 1942-1943 as part of the killing programme codenamed Reinhardt, in a remote corner of what is now eastern Poland, close to the Ukrainian border. The camp ceased to function after the prisoners’ revolt of October 1943. The institution is a branch of the State Museum at Majdanek and describes its work as continuing the mission of the survivors, quoting one of the leaders of the uprising: those of you who survive, bear witness, so that the world learns what happened here.

The permanent exhibition, SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor. German Extermination Camp 1942-1943, opened on 29 October 2020 and runs across sixteen thematic panels, from the premises of Nazi racial policy through the organisation of deportations and mass murder to the revolt itself. Its centre is a twenty-five-metre display case, milky white inside like a laboratory, holding more than 700 objects recovered by archaeologists: jewellery, keys, spectacles, fragments of clothing, writing implements. Smaller cases set into the walls isolate single things, a watch that stopped, a child’s toy, each tied to one person’s fate.

Around this run close to a hundred photographs and documents, a scale model reconstructing the camp’s topography, and multimedia projections drawing on the museum’s archive. The exhibition design echoes the historical site: a structure recalling the railway ramp, a room lined with charred timber. Part of any visit is spent outdoors, where the paths of the new memorial lead from the museum building to the clearing of graves. A temporary exhibition on the murder of Jews in the German Reinhardt operation has been on show since March 2025.

Tips

Admission to the Museum and all its exhibitions is free. From April to October the site is open 9:00-18:00, with the last entry to the grounds at 17:00 and to the exhibition at 16:30; from November to March it closes at 16:00. The Museum is shut on Mondays and on 1 and 6 January, Easter, Corpus Christi, 1 and 11 November, and from 24 to 31 December.

Visiting on your own needs no booking, and the Museum offers a free app that guides you around the grounds. Guided tours are given in Polish, English and German, last about an hour and a half, and cost 100 PLN for a group of up to 10 people and 250 PLN for up to 30 in Polish, or 200 PLN and 400 PLN respectively in a foreign language; book a week ahead by phone or e-mail. Given the character of the place, the Museum advises against visits by under-14s. There is no cloakroom or luggage store, and much of the route is in the open air.

Getting there

The Museum’s address is Żłobek 101, 22-200 Włodawa, though it actually sits by the Sobibór railway station settlement, roughly 18 km from the town of Włodawa and about 95 km from Lublin, off regional road 812 or 816. The turning is signposted, and parking on the museum grounds is free. In summer, from the last weekend of June to the end of August, a train runs on the Chełm-Włodawa line stopping at Sobibór station on Saturdays, Sundays and on 15 August. Minibuses connect Lublin with Włodawa, but from Włodawa itself the only way to reach the Museum is by taxi.

Nearby museums

Eighteen kilometres away, the synagogue complex museum in Włodawa documents the Jewish community that was destroyed at Sobibór. The parent institution is the State Museum at Majdanek in Lublin, and the sister memorial is the museum on the site of the Bełżec camp, the other extermination centre of the Reinhardt operation.