A brief history of the first Ersatz Museum, Poland 1929-1939
The original Ersatz Museum was based in a small town on the river Vistula in Pomerania, Poland, between 1929 and 1939. It was founded, owned and curatored by the enigmatic Joseph Jacobovski (b. 1889). Little is known about his early life other than he was born in Grudziadz to a wealthy middle class family and went on to study Natural Science at Jagiellonian University in Krakow

While there, he met and became friends with fellow student Manfred Sigler, a botany student, and the son of Pietre Sigler, then owner of the small Sircum (or Zircuhm) Museum which specialised in natural oddities. Pietre Sigler had become renowned as an explorer and adventurer as well as a collector of the unusual. The Sircum Museum was located in his own house for many years and became quite popular. It was forced to close in 1919 when Sigler was arrested and later shot by Soviet troops during the Polish-Soviet War, 1919-21.
Through his encounter with both the Sigler family and its strange collection, Jacobovski became increasingly interested in genetics and crypto-zoology and began to finance his own research into these subjects, publishing a series of papers under the title An Unnatural history of middle European fauna. During this period he was awarded his first professorship and began to travel Europe widely, collecting many unusual artefacts. Though an academic researcher, Jacobovski's belief was that there were many abnormalities and strange anomalies within science and history that were continually ignored or dismissed completely if they did not fit into the rigid ideas of mainstream thinking. It was the discovery and investigation of these neglected items that became his main focus and that would lead him to open his own museum and in turn led that museum to house the strange, the curious and even the bizarre.

In 1927 on the death of his father he inherited a large estate. This sudden wealth enabled him at last to begin to establish the first Ersatz Museum to house his growing collection. It would eventually open on August 21st, 1929, located at No 12 Strasburgher, in a converted brewery building that Jacobovski bought outright and part of which he sub-let. Initially, the majority of the collection consisted of natural oddities and various freaks of nature, many directly taken from the earlier Sircum collection, which had been donated by Manfred, as well as Jacobovskis own more recent finds. However over the next few years it was to develop into a much more scientific based institution and by 1932 most of the original collection was replaced by what was always stated by Jacobovski to be 'authenticated articles only'. These also began to include cultural and historical artefacts, curios and ephemera.
Over the next 7 years Jacobovski, with some help from Manfred plus a few enthusiasts, managed to find and purchase many of these unusual and ignored oddities from around the world. They would then be researched, authenticated and finally displayed in their establishment.
Admittance to view the collection was restricted mostly to academics or researchers and was normally by invitation only, although for restricted periods it was briefly opened to the general public, mostly on public holidays.It also held a free annual summer exhibition that remained popular. In truth it seems many people came simply to gawp at the macabre creatures inside the glass cases or the dried, shrivelled bodies of the mummified 'monsters'. Jacobovski always aware of this, never really encouraged or even met his 'public'. leaving that side of the museum management to Manfred, he himself preferring to avail himself only to interested students and like minded researchers.
However the exclusiveness associated with viewing its strange content resulted in museum becoming a popular destination for free thinking scientists, philosophers, writers and artists during the inter-war period and the museum was visited by a host of renowned intellectuals throughout the 10 years it operated.

Unfortunately this enthusiasm was not always shared by mainstream science, which was often extremely vocal in its criticism towards both the museum and it's content. This would eventually even included the methodology employed by Jacobovski and his small team towards the interpretation they put upon their items. Until the outbreak of World War II the museum continued to attract both admiration and criticism in equal measure, the criticism leading Jacobovski to become ever more reclusive and obsessive about his collection and endeavouring to restrict access even more.

During the 1930's Jacobovski occupied an apartment next door to the museum and his rooms were said to be as cluttered with books and artifacts as the museum itself. He seems to have had few close friends apart from Manfred, but gathered a loyal and dedicated team of like minded individuals who assisted in finding relevant artefacts, researching and collating their finds. These included Carson Gillfinger, a British born scientist and the renowned Lithuanian historian and archivist Malek Kovich, who built up a large library of rare and arcane books, maps and charts for the museum. Most agree that they were meticulous in their research and would not allow anything to enter the collection unless it could be proven as genuine.
Only a few photographs of Jacobovski and even the museum itself duringnow exist, most being destroyed during the war. Perhaps the most famous image of Jacobovski remains a portrait, titled simply The Curator, by the equally enigmatic painter and muralist Rozan Dansk, who in the 1930s was a frequent visitor to the museum. Once owned by Jacobovski this survived the war and is now in a private collection.

In early 1939, with the outbreak of hostilities becoming ever more likely, acting alone, Jacobovski and Sigler set to work in evacuating the more valuable pieces to a well prepared, secure and apparently, totally secret location. Although there has been much speculation about where this actually was, it remains unknown. It is further alleged that these items somehow managed to remain hidden for the duration of the war and the following Soviet occupation, were later found and then went on to constitute a large part of the subsequent Ersatz Museum that was established post-war in Norfolk, England.
In September 1939 during the invasion of Poland by Nazi forces the museum building itself was destroyed in a bombing raid. What remained of the original collection which they had not managed to evacuate is not clear, however most of the documentation and library records housed in the museum are known to have been destroyed.

Soon after the destruction of his museum, Jacobovski himself seems to have disappeared and while it is known he survived the raid that destroyed the building, his eventual fate remains a mystery. Over the years, several witnesses have come forward to testify that both he and Sigler joined the Polish underground and while it is known that Manfred may indeed have been a member (there being some evidence that he was subsequently arrested and shot by the Nazis in Lodz, 1940) it has been claimed that Jacobovski managed to survive the war entirely. The last verifiable witness to have seen Jacobovski alive was his associate and member of his research team Carson Gillfinger, who stated that he met with Jacobovski in a small a village east of Krakow in October 1939, when both were trying to evade the occupying forces. Jacobovski indicated that he was going to find a way to Warsaw and join the resistance, later that day they parted and never met again. During the late 1940s several individuals and eye witnesses came forward with rumours claiming that Jacobovski, like Sigler, was either shot, killed in action, or was arrested and died in a concentration camp. though all these remain unverified.

Gillfinger though interned, survived the war and with failing health returned to Poland briefly in 1948 and again 1950. In a shattered and now Soviet controlled country he endeavoured to trace both Jacobovski and the remnants of the Ersatz Collection he had helped build, but without much success. While he heard rumours of Siglers death and proof that his friend and colleague Malek Kovich had died in Stutthof concentration camp, he attested that he never found any real evidence to support any of the rumours concerning Jacobovskis presumed fate. Gillfinger himself died of natural causes in Milan in 1953 and apart from Dansk (who is known to have visited him on his death bed) he is seen as the last surviving link with those few who ran and developed the original Ersatz Museum.

More recent speculation has now suggested that the actual hiding place of Ersatz collection was actually under the museum building itself and so was destroyed when the building was bombed. Although the area was completly excavated as part of the re-development of streets after the war, no evidence of this came to light. Also Gillfinger who perhaps for his own protection was never informed of the secret location by either Jacobovski or Sigler, stated that he was convinced that it had been totally removed from the building altogether.

Much like the museum itself and it's mysterious content the fate of Jacobovski and his remarkable collection remains a mystery to this day.

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