Cele Bezpieki

What to Expect

Beneath Warsaw’s Ministry of Justice — a building most pedestrians walk past without a second glance — lies the basement where Poland’s communist secret police held political prisoners from 1945 to 1954. The Cells of the Security Service is a 600 m² permanent exhibition run by the Warsaw Uprising Museum, opened on March 1, 2018, in the former detention wing of the Ministry of Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego, or MBP).

Around a hundred cells, each holding up to eight people at a time. The prisoners were Home Army soldiers, anti-communist resistance fighters, opposition politicians, and Catholic clergy — people whose crime was refusing to accept the new Soviet-imposed order. The most prominent names held here include General August Emil Fieldorf “Nil,” executed in 1953 after a show trial; Jan Rodowicz “Anoda,” a legendary Home Army operative; and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who survived to become Poland’s foreign minister decades later.

The exhibition unfolds across four sections: the history of resistance against repression (1944-1956), the machinery of persecution (perpetrators and victims), reconstructed cells with original prisoner markings, and the post-1989 effort to restore memory. The third section is the one that stays with you. In six cells, conservators uncovered and preserved drawings, initials, and calendar tallies scratched into the plaster by detainees. You are looking at marks made by people who did not know whether they would leave this basement alive.

Other artifacts speak just as plainly: chess pieces kneaded from bread, tiny crosses stitched from thread, letters written from death cells. Several rooms feature audio recordings of survivor testimonies.

An audio guide (10 PLN) is available in Polish and English.

Allow about an hour. This is not a large museum, and it doesn’t need to be.

Age note: the exhibition is appropriate for ages 14 and up. The subject matter covers political detention, interrogation, and execution.

Tips

• Free on Mondays. No admission charge — a rarity among Warsaw museums.
• Entrance is from ul. sw. Teresy, not the main ministry door on al. Ujazdowskie. Easy to miss if you don’t know.
• Get the audio guide. 10 PLN, available in English. The cell markings and display cases gain a great deal of meaning with narration.
• Pair it with the Mausoleum at al. Szucha. About 500 meters south, the former Gestapo interrogation headquarters. Together they tell two chapters of the same story — Nazi occupation terror and Stalinist repression — in the same neighborhood. Budget 2-3 hours for both.
• Wheelchair access exists but is limited. A stair lift (schodolaz) serves the basement. Call ahead to arrange it.
• Strollers are impractical. Basement location, stairs, narrow corridors.
• Thursday evenings. The only day the museum stays open until 20:00 — useful for avoiding school groups.
• Tickets: 10 PLN standard / 8 PLN reduced (~2.50 EUR / ~2 EUR). Children under 7 free.

Getting There

Metro: M1 line — Politechnika station, roughly a 10-minute walk northwest.

Bus: Plac Trzech Krzyzy stop — lines 116, 118, 166, 180, 222, 518. From there, about 5 minutes on foot along al. Ujazdowskie.

Walking: From the Mausoleum at al. Szucha — about 7 minutes (500 m) north. From the National Museum — about 10 minutes. From Lazienki Park — about 15 minutes.

By car: Paid parking zone with limited spaces. Public transport is the better bet.

Nearby Museums

Background

The building at Al. Ujazdowskie 11 was constructed in 1929-1930. It had an eclectic early history — at one point it housed the United States Embassy. In 1939, German criminal police (Kripo) seized it during the occupation.

After the liberation of Warsaw in January 1945, the building was taken over by the Ministry of Public Security — the communist regime’s secret police apparatus. The basement was converted into a detention and interrogation facility. Home Army veterans, members of anti-communist partisan groups, Polish People’s Party (PSL) politicians, and Catholic priests were brought here, often in the middle of the night. Interrogations took place on floors above; the cells below were for waiting — sometimes for weeks.

The detention center operated until 1954, when the MBP was dissolved in a partial liberalization following Stalin’s death. The Ministry of Justice inherited the building. The basement was sealed off and remained closed to the public for over half a century. What happened there survived only in the memories of former prisoners and their families.

On March 1, 2018 — Poland’s National Day of Remembrance of the Cursed Soldiers — President Andrzej Duda inaugurated the exhibition as a branch of the Warsaw Uprising Museum. During preparations, conservators discovered original prisoner markings in six cells: drawings, scratched initials, tally marks counting the days. These traces had been hidden under layers of paint for decades. They are now the exhibition’s most powerful element — physical proof of human presence in a place designed to erase it.