New ICC publication: Michał Krasucki “The Warsaw Ghetto. Places of Memory”

A story about the universal memory of the city, about a palpable presence that is like a scattered puzzle, from which the author reconstructs stories that are still not fully discovered. Michał Krasucki turns archives into streets, textbooks into traces on walls, cobblestones, maps. Piece by piece, he uncovers successive layers of space and guides the reader through the topography of the non-existent city. His book is not only a guide to Holocaust sites, but also an emphatic map of memory, applied to the contemporary fabric of Warsaw.

The book “The Warsaw Ghetto. Places of Memory” grows out of the author's daily wanderings around the city on the anniversary of the 1943 uprising. For 28 days, Michał Krasucki, a varsavianist, architectural historian and the capital's conservationist, visited one place a day, reconstructing stories that took place both in the ghetto and on the Aryan side. These points on the map of Warsaw, often obliterated or not obvious, come to life through testimonies, reading plans and photographs. What emerges is a moving mosaic of local micro-histories – from the wall on Sienna Street to Umschlagplatz, from the Femina movie theater to the bunker on Miła Street.

It's a book about memory – but not the monumental one, but the one stuck in the space of everyday life.

About the past, which does not allow itself to be pushed beyond the margins of the city, but digs itself deeper and deeper into its substance, creating a complex and increasingly tenuous labyrinth, sometimes revealing itself as a change in the plaster, a deviation of a wall. Krasucki writes about the need to look more carefully – because “every change leaves its mark.”

The publication appears in the Heritologia series edited by Agata Wąsowska-Pawlik, published by the International Cultural Centre in Cracow.

Publication in Polish. 

More about the publication “The Warsaw Ghetto. Places of Memory” HERE.