On the initiative of Jan Ołdakowski, the director of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, the Polish museum set up the Committee to Aid Museums of Ukraine. The project involves nearly 40 museums and cultural institutions from all over Poland, which want to help protect and hide the most valuable collections and monuments of Ukrainian culture, assure their digitization and inventory, as well as collect documentation proving their looting and destruction.

Today, Ukrainian museums face extreme challenges to protect and save collections and preserve the legacy of many generations they care for.

The members of the Committee emphasize that Poland understands it too well. Plunder and destruction of cultural property in Poland took on exceptional proportions during World War II; the culmination was the total plunder and annihilation of Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising and immediately after its fall. Similar losses should never again be suffered by any nation or state. Today, unfortunately, it is a threat to Ukraine.

The initiative group brings together several directors and deputy directors of museums from all over Poland, including the Józef Piłsudski Museum in Sulejówek, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń, the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace in Wilanów, The National Museum in Gdańsk, the Warsaw Uprising Museum, the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów, the Emigration Museum in Gdynia, the Ossolineum of the National Institute of Ossoliński, the Polish History Museum, the Home Army Museum in Krakow, the Zajezdnia History Center, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Łazienki Królewskie Museum in Warsaw, the Military Museum in Białystok, the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw.

The secretariat of the Committee for Aid to Museums of Ukraine is located in the Warsaw Uprising Museum, at Grzybowska Street 79 in Warsaw.

Adrian Andrzejewski