Studia Językoznawcze

The article is situated in the trend of research on the Polish language during World War II, or more precisely, the Polish language used by prisoners of the Majdanek concentration camp. The aim of the article is to present the results of research on a specific area - vocabulary dealing with the names of clothing in the Majdanek camp. The research involved obtaining texts of camp memories written by people who managed to survive their stay in the Majdanek camp, extracting linguistic material from these sources, and then classifying, presenting and discussing individual linguistic units. The study used the philological and dictionary method (the meanings of the units were checked and compared using general and specialized dictionaries of both Polish and German, and on this basis it was determined, among others, whether a word is a loan, a word-formation or semantic neologism), and also the thematic field method - the article presents lexemes belonging to one of such fields. The names of clothing constitute only 2% of all collected linguistic units, which is the result of the very poor and homogeneous clothes worn by camp prisoners, both women and men. The names include mainly loanwords from German, neologisms (neo-semanticisms), and one expression. The names of the clothes express not only the reality of the camp itself, but also the prisoners' attitude towards these clothes.