The blog post was quest-written by Karolina Gembara, a visual artist, researcher, born and raised in Ząbkowice Śląskie in a family resettled from various parts of today’s Ukraine.
A chance discovery of a bag filled with old photographs led the author of this month’s blog post into a poignant reflection on memory, inheritance, and the aftermath of postwar displacement.
The found images – wedding portraits, marginal notes, rare wartime snapshots – revealed a tangled history of Polish and German lives, layered with silence, loss, and emotional complexity. Among them, a photo album titled Erinnerungen (Memories), likely once owned by a displaced German family, raised urgent questions about symbolic appropriation, mourning, and the uneasy intimacy of living with things that are both ours and not ours.
Link to the blog post you can find here.