The museum reopened on Monday, the 87th anniversary of the execution of Polish postal workers who defended the building against German forces at the start of World War II.
The new exhibition has eight rooms, up from three, and for the first time includes the building’s basement, where Polish postal workers fought on September 1, 1939.
The renovation and modernization took about 15 months.
The Museum of the Polish Post Office is a branch of the Museum of Gdańsk. The building was one of the sites attacked by German forces on the first day of the war, when the city was formally part of the Free City of Gdańsk.
The exhibition combines multimedia displays with personal objects, photographs and other material donated by the defenders’ families.
“The opening of the new Museum of the Polish Post Office is an event we have been waiting for with great anticipation, because the most precious thing we can give our fallen relatives is remembrance,” said Hanna Pietrzkiewicz, who heads an association representing families of former Polish postal workers in the Free City.
She said some of the photographs and objects now on display had come directly from family desks and cupboards.
Among the exhibits are the wedding ring of senior postal clerk Franciszek Klinkosz and a bullet-damaged uniform button. Both were recovered in 1991 from a mass grave in Gdańsk’s Zaspa district, where 38 defenders sentenced by a German court had been buried.
The museum also displays a prewar Polish mailbox bearing bullet marks and the outline of a removed Polish eagle, as well as a shirt from the Polish Gedania sports club, a Catholic youth association banner and items of uniform damaged by gunfire.
Gdańsk Mayor Aleksandra Dulkiewicz said the reopening concerned the memory of the city, Poland and Europe. She also announced that preparatory work had begun to restore the cemetery at Zaspa where victims of Nazi Germany are buried.
Museum of Gdańsk director Waldemar Ossowski said work on the new exhibition began in 2017, when funding was secured to conserve 300 objects recovered from the Zaspa mass grave. The project subsequently required years of historical research, conservation work and alterations to the protected building.
Deputy museum director Andrzej Gierszewski said the new exhibition gives greater attention to the everyday life of the Polish community in the Free City before leading visitors to the events of September 1, 1939.
A multimedia film uses photographs from 1939 to tell the story from the Polish perspective. In the basement, footprints mark the room where 38 of the defenders spent their final hours in the building. “Every place here, every small element, has its own symbolism and its place in the story,” Gierszewski said.
Museum manager Marek Adamkowicz said the institution had previously concentrated largely on the battle for the post office. The new exhibition places the defense within a wider account of the Polish community that lived and organized social, cultural and political life in the prewar city.
The Museum of the Polish Post Office was established in 1979. It is located on Polish Post Office Defenders Square in central Gdańsk.
(rt)
Source: PAP