Evidence of Crime

Prepared in co-operation with the Institute of National Remembrance, the exhibition “Evidence of Crime” presents objects recovered from the burial pits at “Laczka”, in Section “L” of the Powazki Military Cemetery in Warsaw. The showcases in Pavilion X hold nearly 200 objects that are at once archaeological artefacts, relics and evidence of crime. They were shown publicly for the first time in the corridors of the former prison on Rakowiecka street - the place where many of the victims found there were put to death.

Between 1948 and 1956 the bodies of political prisoners killed in the Warsaw prison were hidden on unused ground adjoining the Powazki Military Cemetery. The search work carried out between 2012 and 2017 recovered not only the victims’ remains but also the objects they carried to their deaths: buttons, toothbrushes, combs, fragments of footwear, and with many of the victims religious medals and crosses. Cleaned and conserved, these artefacts have been on display at the Museum since March 2018.

Visitors discover the story mainly through quotations from documents in the Institute’s archive and from witness accounts. The display opens on the ground floor of building X with an account of communist terror, its victims and its perpetrators; a separate room is devoted to the officers who made up the apparatus of terror, and the second level to the victims themselves. The exhibition closes with a section on the searches conducted in Section “L” by an Institute team led by Krzysztof Szwagrzyk.