Editors: Judyta Pawlak, Przemysław Kaniecki

Graphic design: Frycz i Wicha

Pages: 296

Publisher: Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews has been building its collection since 2006, pursuing a style of collecting that might be described as ‘romantic’. The primary goal of this intuitive collecting is to preserve heritage and the memory of those whose lives the collected objects were part of. The collection is very personal and consists mainly of gifts donated to the museum in the conviction that it is their most fitting place, a place that will give them new life. Along with objects we have also received their stories, recorded as conversations with donors.

The memorabilia in our collection do not conform to the standard definition of ‘Jewish things’, like ‘Jewish gold’ or Jewish property plundered during and after World War II. They are for most part ‘time-smuggled’ (to use a term coined by Zygmunt Bauman), i.e. ordinary, everyday things that once belonged to Jews or were identified as such and subsequently kept for years as relics of a vanished world. The majority of our donors are Poles who briefly took these items into their care, feeling themselves responsible for multiple, even the tiniest, forms of existence.

The present album contains a selection of conversations with our donors. The interviews introduce our understanding of what it means to collect biographies of people and of things.