“ The plan is a story-telling museum, a chronicle based on eye-witnesses testimony, to honour them not by their deaths but their lives”
year by UNESCO, though notice slipped passed most of us. Now there is to be a Museum of the History of Polish Jews in the old Jewish quarter of Muranów that during the war imprisoned 400,000 people. After regular announcements since the corner-stone from the original Judenrat was laid (Barack Obama visited the site in 2011), it will open in April 2013 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of their Uprising. Roman Polanski’s acclaimed The Pianist in 2002, filmed in Praga, featured this tragedy. The museum’s cost of 20 million Euros is funded by private investors (Deutsche Bank, Lot etc.) under the control of the Federal Foreign Office, until handed over to the City. The five-storeys will look quite spectacular, with a frontage symbolising the ‘rupture’ of the Holocaust and undulating walls in allusion to the Biblical parting of the Red Sea. There will be a virtual shtetl (Jewish district) and journeys around Poland, what the city’s president Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz called “a living museum located in a place scarred by death.” Seven years down the road, I asked its architect, Rainer Mahlamaki, the 55 year-old President of the Association of Finnish Architects, if there was a model for his design chosen from 11 finalists: “No, this is a completely unique model, museums always are. It was my first project outside Poland. Before I didn’t know much about Jewish culture, or Polish culture except the films of Wajda and Kieslowski, but this job is very rewarding in the sense one gets to know many kinds of people and their interests. Now I know a bit more about them both!” Nitzan Reisner of the Jewish Institute says the museum’s aim is to focus not only on the Holocaust but the socio
cultural history of the last thousand years across Poland, including Galicia, now in west Ukraine. The banner is “seeking the truth,” to encourage debate and not dictate one view of the past. “There is no single museum voice,” she adds, echoing Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich’s view. The plan is a story-telling museum, a chronicle based on eye-witnesses testimony, to honor them not by their deaths but their lives. Until now one relied on the internet, e.g. www.mojahistoria.eu and Yizkor for memories. It’ll be intriguing which cultural figures will be chosen as representative from such a wide spectrum as Bruno Schulz, Julian Tuwim, the Communist Aleksander Wat and ex-Talmudist Julian Stryjkowski. We often hear of the Jewish influence on other cultures, but rarely of the same mutual process in reverse. Culture is a two-way street. Jews and Poles lived side by side, even if not totally integrated in the modern sense. The association was once integral to the fabric of the country. Organisers hope the museum will be a catalyst for civic social change in the nation’s thinking. Will it counter the bookshops full of Hitlerism and the dashing hero Hans Kloss? Should Warsaw’s Uprising Museum have included both rebellions? There are big claims, or hopes, regarding dual histories where the largest Jewish population on the planet resided before the formation of Israel, and most of its leaders like the first Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had their roots. Forty two years after Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeled here in silent repentance, said to be a turning-point in German-Polish relations, another chapter of the book of the past that also looks to the future is opened. www.warsawinsider.pl
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