485 days at Majdanek
New edition of Jerzy Kwiatkowski’s memoirs.
Dorota Niedziałkowska, the State Museum at Majdanek
Jerzy Kwiatkowski (1894–1980) was born in Vienna. He studied law at the University of Vienna and the University in Chernivtsi, where he obtained a PhD in law in 1919. He was the son of Stanisław, a Polish surgeon, leader of the Polish community in Bukovina, member of parliament, honorary consul of the Republic of Poland in Chernivtsi and the only Polish senator in the Romanian parliament.
In 1914, Jerzy was drafted, as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian army; he fought on the Russian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Italian fronts. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant; he was a cryptographic officer in the General Staff in Warsaw. In the years 1921-1933, Jerzy Kwiatkowski was the deputy director and head of the Warsaw branch of the Polish Industrial Bank. In the years 1934-1936, he worked as the administrative director of the magazines “ABC”, “Wieczór Warszawski” and Drukarnia Literacka, and further as an administrative director of the machine tools factory “Pionier”, which he was a shareholder.
On 18 March 1943, Kwiatkowski was arrested for collaboration with the Home Army. On 25 March he was incarcerated in the concentration camp in Lublin. Wojciech Lenarczyk gives an account of his further fate in the introductory text to the book:
In the camp, he was placed in the III prisoner’s field and assigned the duties of a gardener. From November 1943 to the spring of 1944 he worked in the camp’s law office, and later an ordinary prisoner performing hard physical labour. Kwiatkowski left Majdanek on 22 July 1944 in the last transport of prisoners. After a month’s stay in Auschwitz, he was transferred to KL Sachsenhausen on 29 August 1944. In the camp near Berlin, he was assigned to the command serving the Politische Abteilung (Political Department), where he performed the duties of a translator from September 1944 to April 1945. He was liberated by American soldiers during the evacuation march on 3 May 1945 near Schwerin in Mecklenburg.
Kwiatkowski, while staying in Bordesholm and Maczków, in the British occupied zone of Germany, began to take notes of his memories from KL Lublin. He wrote on the waste papers of a German transport company, on a borrowed typewriter, in an unheated room. In December of the same year, the typescript was ready. He began making efforts to print but met a total lack of interest from editorial offices of magazines and publishers in East Europe. The first and second (constituting reprints) editions were published by the Lublin Printing House, at the initiative of the State Museum at Majdanek (hereafter the PMM)
485 days at Majdanek is one of the most important diaries for the PMM, with an outstanding documentary importance that stands out against other literary memoirs. The book received numerous and positive reviews in Poland, Great Britain, as well as America. In 1969 it was also discussed in the House of Representatives of the US Congress. According to Wojciech Lenarczyk:
On 20 June 2018, the State Museum at Majdanek presented the new edition of Jerzy Kwiatkowski’s memoirs - 485 days in Majdanek. The book was published in 1966 and 1988. This edition consists of the author’s typescript from 1945, which is released for the first time uncensored and without significant editorial interference.