News

Conservation treatment to preserve the appropriate state of documents in the museum's Archive is being conducted all the time. Successive batches of valuable archival objects are successively sent to specialist workshops. Now a collection of 186 lists of prisoners-of-war from the camps of the VI Military District: Stalag VI C Bathorn and Stalag VI D Dortmund has returned to us.

The conservation treatment was carried out by the Gorekrestauro company. The scope of work included different manners of treatment such as: cleaning the pages and their deacidification, gluing and mending, as well as gently straightening the paper in a bookbinding press. The final stage in the process of eliminating the effects of acidic substances on the paper's structure was part of the Museum's task: the cards were placed in special protective wrappers made of acid-free materials and a special box made of acid-free cardboard.

During their work, Gorekrestauro's experts used treatments such as gluing the pages with heat-sealed paper, deacidification with a special solution and cleaning the paper with chemical-free Wallmaster latex sponge, which remove dust and dirt by collecting it ‘inwards’ without crumbling. These gentle but effective methods will allow documents to stay preserved, so they could last for years to come.

This is, of course, not the end of the work, as a further 420 pages of Second World War documents will be given to conservation by the end of this year.

Photo by Damian Kwiecień (Gorekrestauro).