Exhibition
Commemoration Museum of Wujek Coal-Mine is a special place in Silesia and in Poland. It is in this Katowice coal-mine where in the first days of the martial law – on the 16 December 1981 a massacre took place. Communist order armed forces shot at the miners on strike – 9 of them died shot with bullets. The workers went on strike to protest this way against the martial law (it was introduced on 13 December 1981 by the communist authorities of Poland let by the general Wojciech Jaruzelski) as well as against arresting their colleagues, activists of Independent Self-governing Trade Union ‘Solidarność’, whose leader in the whole country was Lech Wałęsa (in 1983 he was the Peace Nobel Prize Winner).
One of the most important elements of the exposition in the Museum is especially prepared model of the sized 420 cm x 230 cm, presenting in the scale 1:100 the area covered with the operations of the police and military in December 1981.
On the model there are presented coal mine buildings, police and military vehicles, scenes with figurines presenting miners, army and the police. On artificial snow there are imprinted traces of tyres and caterpillar tracks, one may see strike mining flags, barricades and even the streams of water from water cannons and fumes from tear-gas.
All of this very reliably reflects not only the patterns of objects but also the smallest details of the action provided by the witnesses. Opposite the model there is a staging of the clash (with the use of mannequins) of miners and police officers pacifying the strike.
The curators of the Museum are participants of the strike and witnesses to tragic incidents in 1981 in Wujek coal-mine. However, the museum is not only the tribute paid to shot and injured miners by their friends and Polish society.
In the three rooms there is recalled over a hundred history of the coal mine and coal mining. The entrance to the Museum leads through the galery constructed from the rings of mining casing on whose elements there are boards referring to the coal-mine history from the moment of its establishment i.e. 1899 to contemporary times.