Evocative design at the Warsaw Rising Museum
The story of the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944 is fascinating, horrifying, and moving – but I cannot do the story justice re-telling it here (though I will give you a quick summary). Instead, I want to share photos of the museum exhibits because I feel that it really does do the story justice. The design of the museum was thoughtful, evocative, and even at times immersive, and it employed a diverse range of exhibition techniques in sensitive and tactile ways.
A short history of the Warsaw Uprising
In 2004, on the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, a museum dedicated to researching, documenting and disseminating knowledge about this historical event opened to the public. Sixty years might seem like a long time to wait for such a museum, but while Poland was under Communist rule up to 1989, the story of the insurgency was suppressed.
Poland was invaded by the Nazis in 1939 and subsequently became occupied territory. Warsaw was the main focus of the German attack, with arrests, executions and mass murders increasing as the years went by, not to mention the ghetto-isation and persecution of the Jews. After 3 years of living under German occupation, the Polish resistance planned an uprising to commence in August 1944.
After nearly 2 months of fighting with limited success (and many thousands of casualities) they surrendered at the end of September. They ultimately felt they had been let down by a lack of food and support from Allied forces, and broken promises of assistance from the Soviet Red Army.
More than 18 thousand insurgents and 180 thousand civilians died in the Uprising (many in mass murders conducted by German troops both during the occupation and as they retreated). The Nazis were finally forced out of Warsaw by the Red Army in January 1945, and the long period of communist rule began.
During communist rule, those individuals who were known to have taken part in the insurgency were persecuted for having shown a patriotism to the country of Poland which was incommensurate with the surrender of sovereignty to the Soviets. Not only did the communists suppress and even rewrite history to effectively hide the story of this patriotic act, but they even blacklisted any known participants – which meant they were unable to hold positions of influence or power. So it was not until the fall of communism that the story could be told from the point of view of the insurgents themselves.
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- Warsaw Rising Museum plan
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- Map showing prisoner of war camps in Germany and Poland
at the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Poland.
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- Brass slideshow viewers and wall collage
In the first room of the exhibition, the daily life in Warsaw under Nazi German occupation was documented in posters and photos from the time, video documentary interviews with survivors, and cabinets of paraphenalia. Slideshows of photos were shown on screens behind a wall, which could only be viewed through old metal binoculars set into the wall - as if you were spying on enemy across the street.
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- Life-size B-24 bomber
This is the only 1:1 replica of the Liberator B-24 bomber (made in Texas, USA). It is recreated based on original technical drawings, archive photographs and interviews with surviving airmen and mechanics from Squadron 1586.
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- B-24 Bomber plane and drop containers
Allies took off from airbases in Italy with aid for Warsaw, they dropped weapons, ammunition, medicine and food. The containers seen on the ground in this photo were used to drop the supplies.
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- Back-end of the bomber
It was a brave soul who had the job of sitting in there.
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- Recreation of the sewer passageway
This corridor is a copy of a sewer which you walk through this towards the end of the exhibition. Sewers had played a vital role throughout the uprising as communication channels, but were also the passage through which some of the insurgents made their final retreat. Not all of them were to make it though, as the Germans dammed up the sewers and thew grenades, chemicals and sandbags down the manholes.
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- "Beware! Germans"
Graffitti reminding insurgents using the sewers of the danger outside.
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- Coming out of the sewers
When you come out of the sewer you are greeted by a display which is like the surface of a street and a manhole, turned on it's side. There is a collection of photos of men being pulled out of manholes, and inside the manhole itself, is a video monitor. This video shows an insurgent survivor, speaking today about his experiences down the sewers. One part of his story which was particularly gruesome, and memorable, was the description of how they were stuck down the sewers for some time and had to resort to eating sugar cubes soaked in shit, as their only sustinence.
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- Jagged tops of the exhibition walls
The tall wall in the centre of this photo ran all the way down through the 3 floors of the exhibition. It represents the strength and solidarity shown by the Polish people during the uprising.
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- Second floor of the exhibition
Added information was displayed on computers installed inside those concrete blocks.
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- Photos of Poles during the war, printed on canvas
More inventive ways of displaying photo documentation.
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- Recreation of a radio room
Illicit but vital radio operations providing information and communication between the insurgents would have been conducted out of someone's home. I can testify that the selection of furniture and decoration in this room is very convincing, as it matches what North's 92 year old grandmother has in her Warsaw home, which also comes from that period.
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- Memorials to the dead
As the death toll rose to the hundreds of thousands, traditional burial spaces started to run out and the dead were buried in the streets or among ruins of bombarded houses.
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- Cobbled floors and 'distressed' walls
The entire musem was paved with cobblestones rescued from the streets of Warswaw before they were to be covered in tarmac. The exhibition walls were often treated to look like the crumbling walls of a war torn city street.
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- "Once a whore, always a whore" George Orwell
This is an editorial comment from a British newspaper in which George Orwell criticises the British liberal press and intelligentsia for being complicit in German's occupation and the Soviet's expansion into Poland, since noone was daring to speak out against the Yarat agreement, in fact they were even complaining about the UK sending bombers to help the Warsaw uprising. http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=94 All the didactic panels were always written in English and Polish together, as were an cuttings or other 'faux' documents like the one you see here.
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- Memory Wall in the museum's Freedom Park
More than 18 thousand insurgents and 180 thousand civilians died in the Uprising (many in mass murders conducted by German troops both during the occupation and as they retreated). The names of some of the thousands of insurgents who died in the battle in August and September of 1944 are engraved on the gray granite slabs. So far, more than 6,000 names have been added, but the list is continuously being supplemented with new names from survivors or relatives.
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- Colour enhanced photos
The designers decided is was not fitting to include these colour enhanced old photos in the museum exhibition itself, but they displayed a number of them, enlarged, on the rear side of the Memory wall. You can see how effective they are in this location.
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- Exterior of the museum
Exterior of the former tram power plant which houses the museum
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- Entrance courtyard of the museum
Ticket office is the little building on the left. Warsaw city centre tower blocks can be seen behind this.
If you go to Warsaw you must not miss visiting this excellent museum
Warsaw Rising Museum
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