The exhibition: ‘Traces of Memory’ is a photographic tribute to a vanished world, a powerful acknowledgement of Poland’s Jewish heritage:

Jewish civilization developed in Poland over a period of more than 800 years until it was brutally destroyed in the Holocaust. The Jewish past in Poland has been overshadowed by images of Auschwitz and the atrocities committed there. But if we are to fully understand the Jewish past here we need to place another set of images alongside these: the traces of memory that are to be found in the towns and villages where Jewish life once flourished.

This is not an historical exhibition in the conventional sense. We are not showing old pre-war photographs; on the contrary what we are showing are contemporary photographs with the intention of showing what can be seen about the past. To put this exhibition together required the creative collaboration over twelve years between  British photographer Chris Schwarz and  British scholar Jonathan Webber. Working village by village and town by town, the material that we have assembled offers a completely new way of looking at the Jewish past in Poland, the past that was left in ruins. The idea has been to try and piece together a picture of the relics of Jewish life and culture that can still be seen today, and to describe and interpret these traces in a manner that will be informative, accessible, and thought provoking.

We have divided the exhibition into five sections, corresponding to different ways in which the subject can be approached: sadness in confronting ruins; interest in the original culture; horror at the process of destruction; and recognition of the efforts to preserve the traces of memory. We end with a section showing some of the people who are involved, in different ways, with recreating and preserving the memory of the Polish Jewish past.

Chris Schwarz was funded to take the photographs by the Wingate Foundation