The museum unveiled the artefacts on Friday to mark 30 years since the disaster, which took place on the morning of January 14, 1993, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
1993 Jan Heweliusz ferry disaster
In what remains the worst peacetime maritime catastrophe in Polish history, the ferry Jan Heweliusz sank after being caught in a hurricane off the German Baltic island of Rügen.
The ferry had been travelling from the northwestern Polish port of Świnoujście to Ystad in southern Sweden.
Despite an international rescue operation, all 35 passengers, including two children, and 20 crew members drowned. Among them were Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Swedes and Norwegians, the PAP news agency noted.
Nine crew members were saved.
One of them, the Jan Heweliusz’s on-board electrician named Grzegorz Sudwoj, has donated a collection of his personal belongings from the ill-fated journey to Gdańsk’s National Sea Museum.
The items include Sudwoj’s personal sachet, found by a rescue diver near the wreck of the Jan Heweliusz, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea; and the electrician’s emergency suit, which he wore at the time of the disaster.
“As the sea temperature was 2 degrees Celsius [just above freezing] at the time, it’s fair to say that without his emergency suit, Mr. Sudwoj probably would not have survived,” said the Gdańsk museum’s deputy director, Marcin Westphal.
Photo: PAP/Adam Warżawa
All the donated belongings will undergo conservation and may in the future be exhibited at the National Sea Museum, reporters were told.
For now, museum officials have marked 30 years since the Jan Heweliusz disaster by showing the items to the media and laying wreaths at a Gdańsk monument “To Those Who Did Not Return from the Sea,” the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, dziennikbaltycki.pl, polskieradio24.pl