Documents, photos and other personal items, which had no material value, were systematically destroyed by the Germans. However, the necessity to evacuate Lublin in July 1944 and the ensuing urgency meant that they were unable to burn all the personal remains of the victims and in so doing erase the traces of their crimes. After the warfare ended in Lublin, more than 2 thousand private documents and about 800 photographs from Majdanek and Flugplatz were found and secured.
These items must have been of vital importance to the owners as they were taken with them when they left home. The materials include private letters, official letters, identity cards, kennkarte, J-ausweis, ID cards, passports, school certificates, postcards and greeting cards, service receipts, memoirs and notebooks, property deeds and business documents such as commercial orders, delivery notes and others. The documents were written mainly in Polish and German, but also in Russian, French, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Dutch.
The core of the collection consists of 1244 documents that contain personal details of alleged victims or their relatives. The text is dedicated to this group of sources and their role in research on the history of KL Lublin and the German death camps in Bełżec and Sobibór.
Kennkarte of Jan Ściuba, the son (all images in the article: the State Museum at Majdanek)