The name of the museum comes from a pre-war guest-house called ‘Palace’, which was appropriated early in WWII by the Gestapo.The cellars of the building were used to imprison and torture local Polish resistance fighters. It is estimated that about 2,000 people were subjected to torture and some 400 were killed in the ‘Palace’.
After the war, the building served various purposes, including a nursery and school, with only two former prison cells functioning for some time as a small museum. As a result of a major refurbishment which took four years to complete, it is a modern facility, which, according to the director of the Tatra Museum Michał Murzyn, is to be “a place of remembrance documenting the region’s turbulent and complicated war-time history, with a focus on the personal stories of the local people”.
Former ‘Palace’ prisoners included Franciszek Gajowniczek, the man for whom St Maksymilian Kolbe offered his life in the Nazi German concentration camp of Auschwitz, as well as Tatra mountain couriers and famous skiers Helena Marusarzówna and Bronisław Czech, legendary ski jumper Stanisław Marusarz, and physician Wincenty Galica.
The exhibition space includes former torture cells and interrogation rooms. One of the most moving testimonies of the atrocities committed by the Germans in the ‘Palace’ are fragments of the inscriptions scratched by prisoners on the cell walls and doors. The inscription on the wall of the prison cell No.3 inspired Polish composer Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. One of the movements of his Symphony, Op. 36 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" is a setting of the words written by an 18-year-old highland woman – a simple supplication to her mother and to the Mother of God.
A permanent exhibition at the Palace Museum is to open to the public on March 27.
(mk)