Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) – The Hoover Institution has published 485 Days at Majdanek, by Jerzy Kwiatkowski, a lawyer, banker, and industrialist who was incarcerated as a political prisoner at the Majdanek concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War.
Kwiatkowski was working as deputy director of the Pioneer machine tool factory in Warsaw when he was arrested and charged for collaborating with the Home Army resistance.
“One of the most important aspects of the memoir . . . is its attention to the Polish story central to the history of the concentration camps, Majdanek in particular. The initial Nazi attack and occupation of Poland included SS plans to eliminate the Polish intelligentsia, in order to decapitate the nation of its leadership: politicians, professors, lawyers, industrialists, clerics, and cultural figures,” writes Norman Naimark, Hoover Institution senior fellow, Stanford University professor of history, and best-selling author, in the introduction.
In 1945, within months of gaining his freedom, Kwiatkowski sat down to describe his sixteen-month incarceration at Majdanek. He recalled everything he endured and witnessed, from the most mundane frustrations of prisoner life under the Nazi regime to the horrors of its darkest excesses. Kwiatkowski’s memoir has been considered one of the most historically significant accounts of the realities of hard labor, violence, war crimes, disease, and mass extermination in a Nazi war camp. Accordingly, this volume was later called into evidence in the trials of Nazi guards serving in Majdanek.
“This book serves as a sober and timely reminder of the importance of maintaining free and open societies where all individuals, despite differences in race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or political persuasion, are treated with respect and protected from persecution,” writes Hoover Institution Library & Archives director Eric Wakin in the foreword.
Kwiatkowski’s memoir was first released under Soviet-era censorship in 1966. In 2018, it was released in Poland in its uncensored and unabridged form, based on the original 75-year-old typescript that was acquired with Jerzy Kwiatkowski’s complete set of papers by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives in 1975. This new English edition, which includes rare images from the Library & Archives and the State Museum at Majdanek, represents an invaluable entry in the canon of first-person narratives bearing witness to the crimes against humanity committed during World War II.
Kwiatkowski’s papers are part of Hoover’s rich and extensive Polish collection, one of the world’s most important sources of scholarship about Poland during World War II and its subsequent years behind the Iron Curtain, as well as its later independence. The collection also includes primary-source documentation about notable historic figures including Jan Karski, one of the most important wartime resistance fighters, Polish Army general Władysław Anders, and August Zaleski, president of the Polish government in exile.
485 Days at Majdanek is available in hardcover and e-book formats. Click here to purchase.
About the Author, Jerzy Kwiatkowski
Jerzy Kwiatkowski (1894–1980) was a lawyer, banker, and industrialist who was arrested as a political prisoner by the Nazi regime in 1943 and sent to the Konzentrationslager (concentration camp) Lublin, in occupied Poland.
Introduction by Norman M. Naimark
Norman M. Naimark is senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and of the Freeman Spogli Institute and McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University. His most recent book is Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Struggle for Sovereignty in Postwar Europe.
A Note from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives by Maciej Siekierski
Maciej Siekierski is the senior curator emeritus of the European collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. Among his publications is I Saw the Angel of Death: Experiences of Polish Jews Deported to the USSR during World War II, with Feliks Tych.
For coverage opportunities, contact Jeffrey Marschner, 202-760-3187, jmarsch@stanford.edu.
