During my family’s recent visit to Poland, we made a trip to a former Nazi concentration camp at Sztutowo (Stutthof) which is 55 kilometres east of Gdańsk. Stutthof tends to be unknown to most of the Anglophone world since it was a camp that was liberated by the Red Army. The day was sunny, birds were chirping in the trees, spring was in full force – nature was oblivious to the atrocities that occurred on this site years ago.
The now Stutthof Memorial Museum, founded in 1962, takes up only about one-fifth of the former campground. Most of the infrastructure of the concentration camp was either destroyed or dismantled shortly after the war. While the SS burned numerous documents, some were packed and transported alongside evacuating inmates and were later discovered by the Soviet Army in a roadside ditch.
The museum preserves, researches and displays archival records and historical artifacts and includes exhibitions and videos into the haunting insight into the lives of the people that were imprisoned here during the Second World War.
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