Visible & (In)Visible Warsaw

Sarah Molina

How does place—place of origin, place of residence, place of activism—inform our understanding of human rights?

As a group of Humanity in Action fellows coming from different places and invested in different communities, the influence of geography and place cannot be underestimated. A standard map of Warsaw visualizes the city’s most prominent sites and streets, but as we learned from our tour of the past and present Jewish Warsaw, what is visible on a map is only part of the story of place. The invisible—forgotten streets, demolished buildings, and past lives—creates a layered urban fabric that can only be accessed through imagination. This notion of an imagined city seems counterintuitive to the common understanding of urban space as a physical construction. Yet to a newcomer, without the help of our guide, Jagna Kofta, the Jewish history of Warsaw would have remained hidden. This introductory tour to Jewish Warsaw raised critical questions concerning the invisible and visible politics of maps, marginalized urban spaces in flux, and the creation of new narratives in historical spaces.

Some traces of Jewish history were physically more prominent than others. Memorials such as the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes and Miła 18, which both commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, present one method of preserving Jewish Warsaw—the erection of large monuments that make histories of suffering and resistance visible. Other evidence of the Warsaw Ghetto, which was the largest of all ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, was more subtle: historical facades were juxtaposed and partially obscured by contemporary buildings and some signage indicating the boundaries of the ghetto walls graced courtyards. These urban spaces are not traditional monuments or museums. They must preserve history while also accommodating the present—families living in the courtyard apartments, passersby familiar and unfamiliar with the city, undaunted pigeons and stray dogs. These places pose a question that our guide Jagna Kofta vocalized at the beginning of our tour, “How do people live with memory?”

The question of how memory, particularly the memory of traumatic events like the Holocaust, should be understood and displayed has shaped both private and public spaces in Poland. Recently, the decision to re-conceptualize the Museum of the Second World War to tell a more Polish-centric story of the international conflict reinforces the idea that history is constantly being revised for political ends. The question of how to display public spaces of memory is equally complex, as it brings up issues pertinent to the individual and to society at large: who controls urban space? What is the value of creating multiple historical narratives concerning urban space? How can these historical narratives be told to a contemporary audience? 

This last question, which surfaces the binary of history and contemporary, gets to the heart of the debate over memory in public spaces. How does one re-tell or acknowledge memory in spaces of postmemory? Marianne Hirsch, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, coined the term postmemory to refer to “the relationship that later generations or distant contemporary witnesses bear to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of others—to experience they ‘remember’ or know only by means of stories, images, and behaviors.”* Soon there will be no more living survivors of the Holocaust. Our understanding of the Holocaust will be understood through written accounts, oral histories, objects, and markers of urban spaces. Although these modes of postmemory mean a greater degree of distance from history, they also allow for creative responses to traumatic events.

Inscription means: "Here was a ghetto"

On our tour of Jewish Warsaw, these creative responses manifested as graffiti and wall murals. A discreet and faded marking in red alongside the wall of a courtyard that used to include the Jewish Ghetto announced its history. A wall mural commemorating Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was inspiring. These responses to the Holocaust represent a creative method of rendering invisible spaces and stories visible. They also represent some of the most architecturally marginalized ways of creating space. They are one the sides, tops, and corners of buildings. Marginal spaces, as opposed to central monuments and statues, are in flux. Graffiti and wall art (sanctioned by the city or not) can be easily erased and re-created. The late art historian, Michael Camille, once described the margins of medieval urban spaces and objects as spaces of becoming rather than being.* The margins depend on the center, but the center also defines itself through the delineation of margins. This understanding of marginality pertains not only to physical urban space but also to the hierarchies of culture, politics, and identity that have organized cities.

In the coming weeks, it will be a challenge to understand the relationship between margins and centers in the discourse of human rights. I look forward to these discussions and to the interrogation of issues related to urban space, memory, and postmemory. For now, I am left contemplating questions related to the imagined city: how will our own personal interactions with Warsaw create new dialogues and markers within a constantly evolving urban fabric? And furthermore, how can we use what we learn from these imagined maps of Warsaw to better navigate our own home cities?

*Marianne Hirsch, “Vulnerable Times,” in Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today. Ed. Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur. Liverpool University Press, 2016. p. 385.

*Michael Camille. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard