Julek’s Album

This is part of the “Scheda (Something in Common)” project, launched in 2007 to record the oral history of Sompolno, where the author's father was born, grew up, and spent the war. It is a rescue project, with questions about the future and the possibility of care at stake. The project consists of the last stories of former residents of Sompolno, Polish Jews, ethnic Poles, and descendants of German colonists. The turning point is 1947, which marks the end of the town's multiculturalism and the end of the anti-communist underground operating there. These stories are a battlefield and a space for understanding. They continually reestablish a country, a phantasmal country in which we partly live. Those of us in Sompolno, Łódź, Warsaw, Jerusalem, near Munich, or New York have listened to these or similar stories, or to the silence. The project was supported by a grant from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.