Living Among “Wounded Landscapes”

This paper is concerned with contemporary perceptions of the prisoner-of-war (PoW), displacement and forced-labour camps that operated in and around what is today the village of Łambinowice in southwestern Poland. It uses a community archaeology approach to explore how locals relate to the material remnants of the sites and subsequent constructions, including a modern museum called the Central Museum of Prisoners of War. Łambinowice was formerly called Lamsdorf and located within German territory, and camps were first established in the area in the mid-nineteenth century. During World War II, the locality contained one of the largest PoW camp complexes in Europe, where approximately 300,000 soldiers of various nationalities were detained behind barbed-wire fences. The research presented here formed part of a multidisciplinary research initiative titled “Science for Society, Society for Science at the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice”, and involved interviews with local residents and observations. The findings reveal diverse attitudes, approaches, practices and values associated with Lamsdorf’s wartime heritage in the present day.