Many important topics were discussed during the conference. On the first day, the speakers discussed, among other things, the fate of various groups of prisoners. They also presented the legacy of the files and examined scientific literature on the camps. Marta Grudzińska in her speech entitled "Polish prisoners in KL Lublin in the light of the latest research”, presented the fate of the second largest group of Majdanek prisoners and the latest calculations on the number of lives lost. Her study is part of a publication currently being edited by Tomasz Kranz and Wojciech Lenarczyk entitled “Prisoners of KL Lublin. Historical studies”, devoted to various nationalities and victims of the camp. Piotr Setkiewicz presented a paper on Auschwitz 1942, stressing that the establishment of the extermination centre in this camp, contrary to general belief, was not the result of a plan adopted and consistently implemented in advance, but rather the result of a series of repeatedly changing decisions in the context of plans to create an SS industrial centre around the camp and to provide workforce - initially Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and finally able-bodied Jews, selected from among those deported for extermination as part of the so-called “final solution to the Jewish question”.
Piotr Chruścielski in his speech, Not present. On the prisoners of KL Stutthof, about whom we remain silent, presented the current state of research on marginalised groups of prisoners (including common criminals, the so-called antisocial units, homosexuals, people "defaming" the Aryan race, or sailors from the Kriegsmarine penal unit on the Hel Peninsula), while discussing the reasons for the many years of silence on the topic. Marta Zawodna-Stephan in her paper, Necrocommunitas. Concentration camps in the transitional phase, raised issues related to the difficult situation in the so-called non-evacuated camps in April and May 1945 (e.g. Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau), described in the accounts of witnesses as a time of chaos (disintegration of the social structure created during the functioning of the camps, overpopulation, high mortality). The introduced necrocommunitas category also indicates that, in addition to exhausted prisoners, participants in the camp world also included dead bodies.
Wojciech Lenarczyk in his subsequent speech, On the legacy of the files of Nazi concentration camps in the context of the edition of the “Majdanek in documents” presented the assumptions of the research project implemented in the State Museum at Majdanek and the resulting volume of Majdanek in documents. The publication is a comprehensive and first source edition devoted to camp issues. The speaker also discussed the condition of the preserved legacy of KL Lublin and its consequences for the research on the history of the camp. The presentation highlighted the fundamental importance of historical sources, including materials from the camp authorities' office, and the need to make them widely available for scientific and educational purposes in martyrdom museums.
The post-war fate of the documentation of the Stutthof concentration camp is a lecture by Agnieszka Kłys, in which she not only discussed the set of documents of the former KL Stutthof as an important source of information about the functioning of the camp and prisoners, but also its interesting, post-war history. The documents of the camp office in January 1945 were transferred during the evacuation march; only for them to be returned to Poland after more than 20 years. In another paper entitled The Spatiality of a Concentration Camp, Łukasz Posłuszny - based on the biographical materials of former prisoners, maps, plans, and photographs - conducted a spatial analysis of this execution site as a total institution. On the example of the German concentration camp at Majdanek he shows the camp as a territory of violence and crime in the material perspective (panoptic model of supervision, barbed wire), functional and semiotic (horizontally and vertically).
On the other hand, Jerzy Halberstadt in his speech "Determining the Holocaust space in Poland against the background of practices in other countries" dealt with the analysis of the process of creating spaces commemorating the Holocaust on the example of several memorial sites in Poland, and comparing them with similar projects in Germany, Austria, France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, among others.