Emigration Museum

The story of 200 years of Polish emigration, in the restored 1933 marine station

Address Polska 1

The Emigration Museum opened in 2015 in the restored modernist marine station at the entrance to the port — the same building that received and dispatched Polish emigrants on the trans-Atlantic liners Batory and Piłsudski in the 1930s. The permanent exhibition traces 200 years of Polish emigration: to the Americas, to Australia, to Britain after the Second World War, and into the EU after 2004.

It is one of the best museums in northern Poland and an unusual subject for one — the displays manage to be moving rather than nostalgic, and they take in the emigration that broke up families and the emigration that founded Chicago's Polonia. Two to three hours. The café in the old waiting hall is a good lunch stop.

things to do museum
A story
Between 1870 and 1924, an estimated 3.5 million Poles emigrated to the United States — at the time, the largest mass migration of any European nationality. The marine station here was the departure point for many of them, and the museum's permanent exhibition is built around the actual quay where the transatlantic liners docked.