John Beauchamp: I would like to walk, but instead I tread - wrote the Warsaw poet Jerzy Ficowski in a poem about the ashes of Muranów. I travel across cobblestones, I trampled down ashes, I stumble over ruins, I walk over tracks, sunk in the cobblestones. They break off, disappear. Warsaw has plenty of them, but no tram will pass down here anymore. When I drop a stone on a rail, I realize that maybe this is the only sound of that city, the sound of stones thrown on the tracks, children's games, and it is the only sound which resonates in this place today on a short stretch of Nalewki - the main street in the pre-war Jewish district. Here is Muranów - a podcast about the history of Warsaw's Muranów district. 

John Beauchamp: My name is John Beauchamp, I'm a radio journalist. I've lived in Warsaw for over a decade and I often drive or walk through Muranów. The bygone world of this district is not visible when you walk down its leafy streets, yet some streets still bear testimony to all the fires, bombings, destruction and all other conflicts, which blur meaning. Among them as the Mirabelle plum, a holy relic, a symbol of duration, an object of worship. Hannah Krall describes it in a reportage entitled "Obecność" or "Presence". A few years ago, a developer cut down the tree, which was still bearing fruit, and in its place, an apartment building was constructed. Yet history has come full circle. A family, who left Warsaw for New York, took Mirabelle jam to the United States with them. There were a few seeds in the jar and a new tree has grown from them. The current residents of Muranów planted a Mirabelle daughter. The tree is fragile but lives on.

John Beauchamp: I discover more material traces at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN. The building constructed between 2009 and 2013, is located in the center of today's Muranów. It tells the story of both Polish Jews and the district itself. And it is a truly incredible place.

Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz: Well, because here we have so many layers of the history, build up one on another, because today Munarów is nothing like it was before the war. 

John Beauchamp: Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz, curator of the exhibition Here is Muranów, which was on display from June 2020 to March 2021, explains.

Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz: So we are facing the display in the shape of a ordinary table, on which we are presenting mundane objects, excavated here in the place where Polish Museum stands. Those excavations were held in 1998 and 2009, and they proceed the erection of the Polim Museum. Those objects we can treat as objects from the Shoah, because they all found themselves below the ground, where they were excavated later on, during the time in which Nazi Germans were demolishing the ghetto. And we carefully chosen objects connected with the table. Those are tableware: spoons, kitchen utensils, glasses and so on and so forth... We wanted to convey this idea of being at home with your loved ones. And that was the very idea behind this exhibition: to tell the story of this incredible place, the district of Muranów, through the stories of its inhabitants.

Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz: So this Nalewski quarter and Nalewski was one of the most important streets of the district, was home to the biggest Jewish diaspora in Europe - second in the world, from 19th century on. But right now, there is almost no traces of Jews here. And frankly, when we were thinking about this exhibition and its audience, on the one hand about the descendants of Polish Jews, but on the other hand of current inhabitants - particularly about those who wouldn't come to the museum, because, as they say, it is not their history we are telling about. And by this exhibition we wanted to state that the history is somewhat theirs - since they decided to live here and add their own layer to the history of Muranów.

John Beauchamp: What can you remember of a house that doesn't exist after 80 years? Sometimes I have the impression that it's everything. Krystyna Budnicka strengthens me in this belief. She lives in Warsaw, one and a half kilometers south of her pre-war address.

Krystyna Budnicka: Have a look... I found the phone number in the 1938/39 phonebook. Kuczeboruch. Yes, that's OK, 11, 42, 60. Well, no, I didn't learn it by heart, because I didn't use it then, but this is my parents phone number, to my house

Krystyna Budnicka: But, you know, the strange thing is: in my memory, if I only could, I would recreate exactly the wallpaper in the flat, the tablecloth which they stood where because it was may - and that's when my birthday was. There were lilacs, a whole bunch of lilacs in a bulged phase, and the tablecloth was like a tapestry. The wallpaper was rather strange, because there was a lot of navy blue with floral motifs. If I remember correctly,

Krystyna Budnicka: I remember in the Nalewki, I remember that street, which was a very characteristic commercial drag. And when you entered it, there were shops, shops, shops all around. But there were in the yards. You went into some kind of a hallwa,y and from there into the courtyard workshops and shops.

John Beauchamp: Halina Birenbaum talks about what the residents of Muranów looked like, back in those days. She is a writer, poet and translator who has lived in Israel for years. She spent her childhood on Nowiniarska Street.

Halina Birenbaum: And then wore caps, if not hats -they were rather elegant, but Jews usually had caps. The peak and the top were kind of connected. And they had long overcoats, many of them not all, but many who had beards, long curls, so-called PIOs. And the average people were caps, pilot hats and winter, earmuffs... And women had muffs in winter, long coats with big collars and the muffs. Yes, I also had one, but I wore it with string around my head so I wouldn't use it. It was like a bag, actually. You could put various things into it,

Krystyna Budnicka: My dad was a carpenter, a master carpenter. That was his profession. We lived on the ground floor and Dad's workshop was located in the basement under our flat. My brothers work together with my father. I had older brothers, six of them. There were ups and downs. I know that things were not always, let's say, "in the best order" when it came to money. I remember once there was an issue whether we would go on summer holiday. Dad said they didn't have the money, and mum said to Dad: All right, but if we don't go on holiday with the kids, I want a new hat and some new stockings.

Halina Birenbaum: For breakfast, there was scrambled eggs made with two eggs or so-called eyes: fried eggs, bread rolls, cheese, cocoa, and that was on Fridays and Saturdays. Otherwise, it was usually tea. Mom wanted me to drink milk, but I wouldn't drink it. It was disgusting. So Mom gave me chocolate. She bribed me with all kinds of ways to drink the milk. It was still so disgusting. But Mom said it was the best thing ever and egged me on with her chanting Drink, drink...

Krystyna Budnicka: I remember various ceremonies and holidays as we lived in a religious home. The celebration of Passover, Pessah,

Krystyna Budnicka: Goshi was a whole ceremony. We weren't rich because in rich homes and I didn't see what it looked like until I was in Israel. There are separate cuppers where you keep separate dishes for Pessah and it wasn't like that at ours.

Krystyna Budnicka: So I remember that before the holidays we made the dishes kosher. You poured water into a cauldron for cooking laundry, put dishes in it all the pots. And that had to be taken somewhere in the yard because you put a red hot iron slug inside. You know what a slugg is?

Halina Birenbaum: The red hot slug's started to bubble. And has it continued to bubble? You had to do it several times. Pesach was the most colorful holiday. And then there was Succot.

Krystyna Budnicka: You would build a kind of a shack in the backyard. It had no roof because there were only spruce branches around. And I must tell you that I remember that smell for a long time. And I searched for such a smell like, decaying spruce twigs, sometimes in the forest. I could never find that scent. It's lost somewhere now, but I was looking for it. It was so special!

Krystyna Budnicka: And what did the children get up to? Yes, they made paper chains to decorate the huts. The men would usually sit there, the food would be brought out and eaten and the children would play around. I remember how in the winter on Saturdays, when you weren't allowed to light the oven, but you had to eat something warm. There was a bakery not far from our tenement house, and on Friday before Shabbat, you took a pot with fruit to this bakery was called Czulent. It was a kind of hot pot with meat, beans, potatoes and egg. The point was to keep it warm and you would put it in a hot bread oven and bring it home at noon the next day. And that was the whole ceremony.

John Beauchamp: Józef Hen, a well-known Polish writer and essayist, lived on one of the most important streets in pre-war Muranów. He went to school here, watched foreign films in the cinema and played sports.

Józef Hen: On a Nowolipie street, there was a round pavilion in the winter. They used to pool water there, because there were still winters back then. So there was an ice ring. They even played some music and turned on the lights. People learned how to skate, others seem to dance. And in the summer there was a velodrome,  so I learned how to ride a bike there, and how to skate to. If you had the right shoes, that is with those stick and blades, you could then borrow skates. I remember that the first time I went out on the ice, I fell over 32 times. The second time only a dozen or so times. And towards the end, already in 1939, at the ice rink at 21 Leszno Street, where we played volleyball in sunny weather, and where I fell in love with a girl - her name was Gina - we played hockey there, without stakes, like football. You had to skate well and it was probably in March of 1939, maybe even towards the end of February, because everything was already melting. And when I came home with my skates on my shoulder, people looked at me like I was crazy because it was a sunny day

Józef Hen: As you know, 1939 was a very hot year and early summer and then a hot summer and autumn. No rain. 

Krystyna Budnicka: Such are the flashes of memory not recorded anywhere - that was my whole life, the life of a six year old, because after that it was all bad.

John Beauchamp: The sad truth about Warsaw's past is that today it's easier to meet a stranger from the other side of the planet, than someone who survived the ghetto and wants to talk about it.

John Beauchamp: Marian Marzyński has not lived in Poland for 50 years. He flew into Warsaw from Boston and as a director, lecturer and documentary filmmaker. We met for the first time a few years ago. I was surprised then that he decided to hug me as a greeting, with affection, like a dad.

Marian Marzyński: I give lots hugs and kisses, you know, I have something in me that my mother didn't teach me, but her relationship with me was so incredibly loving, that it was me probably responding to her feelings. I kissed her all my life - my mother.

Marian Marzyński: You know, I was a sad, unhappy child who dragged through the war years, that his mother would return, who had no one to hug him, and who had no one to embrace him. What can you say? Not cuddled enough. But the pampering took place in the years when I was in the ghetto. Well, though, of course, I was hocked and cuddled there, but only for a short while. Oh, yes, in the ghetto it was one big carnival of cuddles. There is a myth about what the ghetto was. Of course, there was a ghetto of poor people. There was a ghetto of children dying of typhus and starvation, children's bodies in the streets. But there was also a lot of people who are able to manage materially, because they either had professions like my father, who was an engineer and worked for the Jewish Council in the ghetto and did home repairs. I can only imagine that he was paid meagerly, but he was probably paid mostly with meals, food.

Marian Marzyński: My mother ran a kitchen like that in the ghetto, a street kitchen. She would make soup and serve it up. Wew lived with three families, relatives who came from other towns. There were twelve people in three small rooms. And there, you know, they didn't even let me look out the window.

Marian Marzyński: They protected me, my father, mother, cousins, you know, I didn't know where I was at all. I didn't know at all. I was born in 1937. In 1940 we went to the ghetto. If you have children, you know what age it is: 3 years and suddenly you are in another apartment. Lots of people. In the previous apartment guests came from time to time. And here our guests sit on your hands, all the time. So kids like it: they can fool around, they have an audience. Besides, they operated on my either - a very serious operation, though without anesthesia. I squealed like a piglet put to the slaughter. Well, there was a dramatic concentration of lither, but not to the extent that we would like to put it in the context of the ghetto, which is known from publications or from photos.

Marian Marzyński: I remember the games hiding for fun in a laundry basket with my older cousin, with whom we pretended that Germans had to come and we hid in a basket and together she and I in a big basket.

Marian Marzyński: And then at some point I said, They are gone. They are gone. And we opened alerts and went out. It was pure fun. I didn't know what Germans were. Maybe she knew. It's like playing policemen and thieves. You say Germans, but you don't know what that means. Well, your enemies, of course. It's like playing a video game. She probably knew because she was six years older. But would she tell me? No, you don't tell her three year old child you are in danger of dying. You know, would a three year old child understood what that means?

Marian Marzyński: The ghetto was taboo. My mother didn't start telling me about the ghetto until five, seven years later, because otherwise she would burst out crying. It was something you had to forget, something you had to keep quiet about. Besides, I didn't have enough memory to be able to talk about it without my mother's help. Only my mother had to put my fragments together in my head at some point.

Marian Marzyński: Ghetto is not a dramatic memory for me. The dramatic memory starts with escaping from the ghetto. We were arrested by blackmailers, but without my mother I wouldn't have known what to do with it - tThis memory. She had to give me a context for it. And this happened many, many years later. I only learned everything in America from her, when I went with her on a long trip to the Western states, and we had a lot of time. You know, my worries that I felt that it was my parents who left me, not Adolf Hitler. You know, I didn't know who Adolf Hitler was and I didn't see what the context was. I knew that I must never use the word Jew.

John Beauchamp: Marian Marzyński tells his story on his way to the station. He is leaving Warsaw for Łódź to meet students at the film school there. It is noisy at the station. We have to hide from the noise. We find a quiet place in the pharmacy.

Marian Marzyński: Come and crouch down somewhere, I'll pretend my heart hurts and that I'm waiting for my medication.

Marian Marzyński: So first the woman. I didn't know who she was. She introduced herself as a relative. Said she was taking me on a trip and, well, I had to say goodbye. The circumstances of this are that my father hadm what was called: a life pass. The life pass meant that during the blockade's Jews were pulled off the wagons, my grandmother and great grandmother were put on a train. Other members of the family, too, and we were left after having our IDs checked and went home because my father had a note saying that engineer Boris Kushner is needed for the Warsaw ghetto and we ask his family not to be deported. At some point, the children were excluded from this exception. And we got a message that at any moment they could send me by train to the gas. I was with a guide who may have been one of Irena Sandler's nurses. It was impossible to determine who this person was, because nobody introduced themselves, nobody had a name. I just don't know.

Marian Marzyński: It was all a conspiracy, probably. Mother did not know either. She got a message that one day a woman would announce herself. So she took me and we went through the ghetto in a completely normal way, because a Polish policeman, a Jewish policeman and another gendarme were bribed. Probably either Jewish policemen or the Polish one - probably the Jewish policeman organized the bribe. You didn't have to report to each one. You paid one person, probably a Jewish person. And he said this, the rest with all the others. And he said; tomorrow a woman with a child will pass here and will just turn the other way. 

Marian Marzyński: And we went out, just like everybody else. And we ran into the blackmailers immediately, because it was a wall of criminals who waited for every time people came out of the ghetto. You were stopped. You brought a Jewish child out of the ghetto, it's going to cost some money. So she says: no, this is not a Jewish child. Prove it. I'm not going to talk to you at all. She called a cab. The cab driver took us. She said, I'm going to the police and we will explain everything. 

Marian Marzyński: And we really did get rid of the blackmailers. And we were with a policeman. At that time I was shouting and crying that I wanted to go to the ghetto, that I wanted to go to my mom, because that was the drama -I realized: the first memory of a child. She was gagging my mouth and we were driving through that line of blackmailer's. Then we left for the street and went to the police station.

Marian Marzyński: It was already established that the manager got a gold watch. He had to pretend that we had been arrested. We sat for a couple of hours in the company of prostitutes and thieves. You know that pretending that an interrogation was going on, that we were being detained for a while and we left and ended up in the apartment of my aunt, my mother's sister, who was married to a Pole - a Catholic - and also another Jewish woman, who was his lover at the time. This was the heroic uncle Alexander: Don Juan, who saved the lives of two Jewish women, during the occupation and wanted to sleep with both of them at the same time.

Marian Marzyński: They took us in for a day or two. Then my mother arrived, who had made her way from the ghetto to the other side through the courts, with the help of her relative: a Jewish policeman. The court building boarded the ghetto. So it was a way of escaping from the ghetto that you had a case in court. The Jews entered from Leszno Street, from the site of the ghetto, and the Poles from Ogrodowa street, which was behind the wall. And you had to go through some labyrinths so no one would follow. Than the Jewish policemen left you, went back to the ghetto and all you had to do was walk through the gate pretending you were from that part of town and then that blackmailer's hit again. This time Alexander was waiting for Mother, that beautiful Alexander. But then it was about where I could be kept.

Marian Marzyński: Well, it's going to see... Wagon 1, you still remember?

Marian Marzyński: I'm at the Orionists priests and sisters as the youngest boy - a religious enthusiast, serving mass, dreaming of being a priest, dreaming about God's salvation, learning the catechism with incredible enthusiasm. Although I sometimes had this recurring dream that there are two gods: one is Jewish with huge boots on the ground. Well, he is so tall that you could hardly see him in the clouds and that this is the secret God that you can't talk about, because my parents told me: never forget to lie. You may not know what it means to be a Jew. It's too difficult for you to understand,  but remember, if anyone asks you, you can't admit that you are a Jew - and you are: you have to lie because if you don't, they will kill you. On the other hand, there was another God that I associated with the priest. He was short, actually the size of a priest. For me, the priest was a god. If I'm his altar boy and I dress him and he looks after me and speaks to God, this means that I am also under the protection of God.

John Beauchamp: As Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz reminds us: the end of the history of the northern quarter begins with the German occupation of Warsaw.

Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz: Everything came to its end with a break out of the Second World War in September 1939. Because here where we have we had over 300 000 people living, 90 percent of them were Jewish. So a year later, 1940 and Nazi Germany turned this place into the biggest ghetto occupied Europe. And all the inhabitants were basically, uh, they all perished either here, uh, due to hunger or diseases or they were sent to Treblinka death camp, where they perished in gas chambers. So after the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943, when Germans tear down this place and burned it, this area was covered with with heaps of rubble, several meters high. This debris was a symbol of the end of the history of pre-war Warsaw Jewry, also Polish Jewry.

John Beauchamp: Visual perception of the two levels, the former street grid and the new development will testify to the major cataclysm to historic watershed - wrote the chief designer of postwar Muranów, architect Bogdan Lahert, in 1948. Muranów rose from the rubble.

Kamila Radecka-Mikulicz: Chief architect of Muranów Bohdan Lahert, he decided that instead of wasting years to remove those incredible amount of rubble, he decided to utilize it on site as a building material and to build on it and from it. And, I quote, because he envisaged this estate, he wrote, "The one and only residential estate in the world, which is a monument to the ghetto and a living monument of that, for it can fulfill its role only through its new residents. They cocreate the estate from the moment they move in the sheer existence and each mundane daily activity, testify to the victory of life over death in the place marked by the Holocaust". And today, Muranów is both a memorial, visited by the descendants of Warsow Jews, and a new home appreciated by its inhabitants, among others, for the proximity to the city center for lots of greenery and for the architecture, which enables bonding with neighbors.

John Beauchamp: Shortly after the physical destruction of the district and the extermination of its inhabitants, new housing estates were built. New, different people moved into them.

John Beauchamp: Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska, a Warsaw guide who has lived in Muranów since her brith, explains

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: People say different things around here. Having lived here all my life, I've never heard of anyone having any problems. And now, all of a sudden, some unbelievable stories about ghosts emerge. It is definitely traumatic for those, who are aware of the place, its history. But you can't live constantly with such a conviction that you're walking over bones, because you wouldn't be able to live. But I always have this impulse: when they dig in the ground pipes here, pipes there - when they dig up the utilities - I always look in these holes, and they're deep and there always traces there: bricks, foundations, they're traces of houses. They're they are...

John Beauchamp: Franciszek Mielczarski remembers the rubble in Murano. He has run an upholstery shop here since the late 1960s.

Franciszek Mielczarski: When they were cutting through a street to connect to others, a bulldozer, a big Soviet bulldozer, trucks, they called it Stalin'iets, it fell in a disused basement because the ground collapsed underneath it. And here everything is standing on rubble. I've been working here in this district since 1967. Here, where the museum is now, I remember it being just a huge pile of rubble. Trucks would come and go, as well as Horse-Drawn carts. The heap was like half of a square. The excavator would go, pick it up and take it down - about two stories high. The heap was that tall. When they started building housing estates, they pushed everything onto the square. It was the so-called Jewish square. Later they would come for a walk with their dogs and call it the dog field.

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: Just from the beginning, I knew where I was, maybe even more than other children, because my father told me all the time. My parents were Warsavians. My grandparents were also Warsavians and they had been connected to Warsaw for four generations. And we didn't dwell on it much because: what can you say? If someone decided to live here - they did just that. But that's life. After the war, people were happy to be alive, to have survived, to have flats. And maybe that's why they were reluctant to talk about where they lived. Someone would say "the ghetto" and the rumbling reply, yes, well, there was a ghetto. And what about it?

John Beauchamp: Marek Ślusarz settled in Muranów in the first half of the 1960s. What did he know then about the district's past?

Marek Ślusarz: Well, I didn't know much then. This ignorance was widespread. And it wasn't just from the early 1960s. It lasted many years, up until I went to a secondary school. It was just like that. We didn't know what was here. Our parents didn't tell us either. This was my place: here I slept, here I was safe, here lived my parents. I didn't even remember when I found out. It was rather during the Solidarity period, a kind of super-awakening. Because then we started to learn about the untold, true history of Poland: about the ghetto.  I even remember that we knew photos from the ghetto, but it was the war: We just didn't know that there were Jews in there. 

Marek Ślusarz: Tt was such an understated story.

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: I don't remember. It was probably in the fifties. It was when the Chinese embassy was established, not far from here. I was little, maybe six years old. I didn't go to school yet. I know I was allowed to play under my mother's supervision, but I wasn't allowed to go out through the gate into the street.

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: But older kids would come running to find beads at park Krasińskich - you know, the kind which are still used today for embroidery and to make bracelets: little beads, as small as a pinhead, very colorful...

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: Children would run and bring handfuls of colorful beads. Only later did I realize where these beads came from, because I hadn't thought about it before. Before the war, such beings were very popular. My mom used to say, that when she and her sisters embroidered, they dreamed of buying such beads by weight. These were beads sold by weight, tiny. So there must have been a Jewish shop in the ruined house.

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: Muranów was then a district of young people, the children of the baby boom generation was being born. I belong to one of the most numerous years. Classes and school, had over 40 pupils. 

Marek Ślusarz: The kids, apart from doing their homework, were in the yard all the time - almost up until nightfall. But no one was watching us. Parents only called out that it was time to come back.

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: There were swings sandpits everywhere and these kids really played in the yards, you know.

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: Moms would call out at lunchtime: Krzysiek, Zdzisiek! Time for lunch! Hania!" - moms would call out. My parents were average people. They did not have high professional positions, but they earned moderately well. There was usually pork chop on Sunday or some stuffed cabbage. Sunday dinner was even two courses. A normal dinner,

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: There were shops next to shops, a grocers, a butchers, a very large stationery shop where you bought all the school supplies and then even more shops. It was full of people. And I remember a kiosk next to a beer stand. We used to call it a beer stand, but they didn't just serve beer. There was also soda, for example: delicious pear-soda. But the best thing was that it was poured into beer glasses. Today is unthinkable to stand in the street and sip beer for mugs, but then it was still normal. Anyone who wanted a beer would go to a tap room and have a chat with their neighbor and the children. My father didn't like drinking beer in the street and he didn't go there. But I know kids ran around. Because when Dad went for a beer right there in the same stall, there were big red lollipops, round ones, and fathers would buy them lollipops. Lots of traffic, lots of people in the street, children in the yards. Such a familiar atmosphere.

Józef Hen: And I dread to say what we were playing at. At that time there were still fragments of celluloid tapes, so we made smoke candles out of them. They burned very well. We did it for fun. There weren't many toys. We had to find a stick to play tag or we played ball. 

Marek Ślusarz: We would take sulfur out of matches, screw it in between two screws, tie it with string, light it on fire and toss it. It would burst. There was a bang. At that time there was shooting in the backyard. That's how boys played. We played at war.

Marek Ślusarz: Because all the information which surrounded us in public spaces, in the media all the time, there was war. Marthydem. This harming of the nation by the evil Germans. That's how it was presented. There was simply too much of it. So in the subconsciousness of young people, there was that din of war of sorts, matched with a slogan: I will be a soldier. This arose not only from need, but rather from indoctrination and the propaganda of those times,

Jolanta Błaszczyk-Rutkowska: The whole of Muranów is a completely different atmosphere. Now it's gone. It's like a century has passed.

Halina Birenbaum: I've read so much in the history of Warsaw, that I have a tendency -  I can see it as my second skin -  When I walk along the streets, I have a kind of a déjà vu, a kind of double exposure, like a film placed over a film. When I'm in a hurry, I don't have time to think. But when I'm walking down a street in peace, I suddenly remember a story which I once read about. This is something you try to avoid, but it's also here in Muranów. Yes, it is. Such visions may be a snapshot, rather a second, a bat of an eyelid: that someone is shooting at someone here.

John Beauchamp: It is early April 2021. A windy Saturday, the square in front of the Polin Museum. The artist Artur Żmijewski, together with a group of Warsaw residents, reads old maps and recreates the shapes and contours of non-existent buildings,

Artur Żmijewski: We're creating a map. Scale of the map is one to one. And this is the map of, let's say, former buildings located on Zamenhofa Street on the junction with Gęsia Street. These buildings were existing here 70, 80 years ago. We are using chalk, white chalk, also yellow and red. So with red chalk we write numbers. And the white color we are using for to mark the borders of these buildings - and also to mark the street where it was, we was Zamenhofa street. And it's also temporary, it should be temporary, it should be removed quite soon. I think it will disappear. It will be dissolved by rain and by water and wind and so on. But why it's interesting to mark i? Because these buildings don't exist anymore. But in fact, let's say that the lower parts of the buildings, basements or fundamentals are still in the ground.

John Beauchamp: This is a podcast about Warsaw's Muranów district. It was inspired by the Tu Muranów exhibition at the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It was produced by Bartosz Panek at Free Range Productions. This podcast was made possible thanks to the cooperation with the German Committee for the Support of POLIN Museum and the kind support of the The Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation.