Small Town

I grew up in a town like many others, with its central square, streets extending from it, a church, a market. This is where life unfolds. But take a few steps to the side and you will find yourself in a quarter emanating a different aura. A disturbing yet compelling pocket. Neglected houses. Flaking paint. Overgrown gardens. Stillness and emptiness.

This is what I see. But what am I looking at?

The street I grew up on once ran through a Jewish ghetto, within which, during World War II, 9000 Jews were cooped up. Some died in the ghetto; most were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp. Before the war, the Jewish population of ‘my’ town comprised sixty percent of inhabitants. This is all supposed to be history now: war, Poles, Jews, Germany, the Shoah. Hatred. Indifference. Sometimes heroism. Seized property. Shame. In the end, silence. Memory/amnesia.

On a former Jewish house, I find a faded inscription: ‘Space gives us signs, speaks to us simply […], not literally […]. Let us give it what it wants.’ Space cannot be converted into a museum, but it remains as a visible trace of vanished neighbours.

Small Town documents what remains in present-day Polish towns of the places and spaces where Polish Jews once lived their lives. An attempt at reading the remains, it captures what is still visible, tangible and repeated in the Polish landscape, while reaching out for what hovers unacknowledged in the air.

The series’ photographs were taken, in 2018–2020, inside the boundaries of former Jewish ghettos in towns within the Germans’ General Government zone of occupation, a territory encompassing the present-day Polish voivodeships (provinces) of Lublin, Małopolska, Mazovia, Podlaskie, and Świętokrzyskie. From March 1942 to November 1943, ‘Operation Reinhard,’ the German programme to murder Jews living in the General Government zone, resulted in as many as two million Jews being sent to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps.

62 journeys behind me, several hundred ahead of me.

The project was presented during the ShowOFF section of the Krakow Photomonth in 2020. Curator: Joanna Kinowska

Listen about the project in Iga Niewiadomska’s program “Głębia Ostrości” Polskie Radio 24.