“The Chance of a Lifetime.” Interview with Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett on the 10th Anniversary of the Grand Opening of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Your parents were born in Poland, you were born in Toronto, and your professional life is based in the United States. You are Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University, a scholar of Jewish culture, particularly as presented in museums; you are the author of numerous publications. Why did you decide to become the Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at the museum in Poland?

The first thing I should say is that I have had a passion for museums since my childhood. I’ve just always loved museums. As a child growing up in Toronto, I spent every Saturday at the Royal Ontario Museum. To this day, it is one of the most formative experiences of my life. When I was 18, I actually got a job in their education department. I was thrilled that I could actually work in a museum, and I was still in high school. So fundamentally, the starting point is my childhood passion for museums and the desire to work in them from an early age.

Second, I am a museum professional both as a curator and as a scholar. As a curator, I have worked in collections and developed exhibitions. As a scholar, I work on the history and theory of museums. My specialty is the history of how Jews have presented themselves and have been represented by others in world fairs, expos, exhibitions of all kinds, and eventually, museums.

Third, I am the child of Polish Jews. As a result, I bring an unusual combination of expertise, experience, and biography: a personal connection, a curatorial career with practical experience in making exhibitions and working in collections, and a career not only as a museum studies scholar, teaching and writing about the history and theory of museums, but also in Jewish studies where my focus has been on East European Jewish culture.

Around 2002, I heard that there were plans to create a museum of the history of Polish Jews in Warsaw. It seemed like a rumor. That’s all I heard. Not who was doing it, not why they were doing it, not what it would be, not where, nothing. It was so vague. I thought this idea wasn’t serious. I just figured maybe some amateur was going to create a little display in a room in a high school. But then I got a phone call from Jerzy Halbersztadt. Michael Steinlauf, who had been working closely with him, was somebody that I had known and admired for many years. Apparently, he suggested that Jerzy talk to me.

Jerzy called me on the phone. He said he was going to be in New York, and could we meet; he’d like to tell me about the project. We met at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan, and he showed me the project on a little laptop. I just thought: “Oh, my God! This is incredible.” I owe Jerzy everything, and I consider him the visionary who led this project during its most formative period. He stepped down from the directorship of the museum in 2011, but what he did until then really shaped the project’s direction, and he deserves every credit.

A few weeks later, I got a call from Jerzy inviting me to Warsaw to evaluate the work they had done up to that point. They had achieved a lot: a 147-page detailed “Outline of the Historical Program,” prepared by a team of Polish historians. It was very good, very well written, very detailed, and it covered everything. This document was an excellent basis for the design company to create a masterplan for the exhibition.

Was it a difficult decision? How long did you think about it before you decided to take on this task?

Moments! I didn’t anticipate this invitation. I didn’t aspire to it. I didn’t ask for it. I just thought I’d be a consultant. I was happy to make myself available, to offer whatever Jerzy needs, no problem. I was very happy at New York University. I was teaching a graduate seminar that I called “Museum Theater.” I just loved teaching it, and the students were great; they were doing wonderful projects. But when this opportunity arose, it was the chance of a lifetime, I just had to say yes.

Initially, I started halftime, but it quickly became clear that you couldn’t create a Core Exhibition with a halftime leader of its development. I had to take a leave of absence from the university, and I moved to Poland to work on the Core Exhibition full time. I believed that this project was incredible, that it could be transformative, and that I wanted to bring to it everything I had ever done, everything I knew, the best that I could offer to make this museum the absolute best it could be. This museum deserved it, and I wanted to help make it happen. I also knew that by doing work on this project, I would be thinking new thoughts about museums, my own thinking about museums would develop, and that however much I could contribute to the project, I would be learning an enormous amount. I’d be working with a great academic team, I’d be working with world-class designers, and I would be collaborating with the leader of the project, then director of the museum, who was open and supportive.

That was indeed a significant challenge, and POLIN Museum holds great importance in Poland. The cornerstone for its construction was laid in 2007, and the official opening of the Core Exhibition took place in 2014. As we’re discussing this in 2024, a decade after its official opening, I would like to ask you: how do you evaluate these first 10 years of the Museum’s activity? What do you consider the greatest success in the history of the Museum?

First, we’ve had great success in terms of visitor numbers. If I were to identify museums that have numbers as good as ours or better, it would be Holocaust museums – the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, for example. When it comes to Jewish museums in Europe, it would be the Jewish Museum Berlin. As for the United States, no Jewish museum approaches our numbers. New York’s Jewish Museum reaches about 250,000 visitors a year, even though it is located in a city of 8 million people, attracted close to 57 million tourists in 2022, and is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, almost 2 million in the New York metropolitan area. In contrast, POLIN Museum attracts almost twice the number of visitors in a city with less than 2 million inhabitants, a few thousand Jews, and 19 million tourists in 2019. POLIN Museum’s visitor numbers are simply extraordinary, and that includes breaking attendance records for our temporary exhibitions. I don’t know of any exhibition in the United States in recent memory on a Jewish (not Holocaust) topic that got 135,000 visitors, the number who attended our most recent temporary exhibition, Around Us a Sea of Fire: The Fate of Jewish Civilians during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Jewish museums in North America assume that their visitors are likely to be Jewish and struggle to attract the general public. But in Poland, it seems that almost everybody’s interested in Jews. If you had to depend on Jewish visitors, POLIN Museum would never achieve those numbers, nor would it fulfill its mission, which is to foster dialog in the spirit of mutual understanding and respect in light of the history of Polish Jews. In contrast, American Jewish museums are preoccupied with Jewish identity and continuity, given that intermarriage is rising, synagogue attendance is declining, and attitudes to Israel are increasingly ambivalent. The American Jewish community can no longer depend on Judaism, Holocaust, and Israel as linchpins of Jewish identity. In many ways, Jewish museums are the synagogue for Jews who don’t go to synagogues. They function in a very different way than Jewish museums in Europe, where most visitors are not Jewish.

POLIN Museum’s visitor numbers and makeup depend on the season. In the off-season, it might be 70 percent Polish, 30 percent international. In the high season, maybe 50/50. About half the international visitors are Jewish, about 50/50 from the Diaspora and Israel. So POLIN Museum’s success is reflected not only in numbers, but also in who comes because one of our goals is to be an agent of positive change in Poland. We want to engage the public in the history of Polish Jews, including both its best and worst moments, and to do so in a way that can speak to a wide range of visitors. Visitor numbers are a metric; you can measure the number of visitors.

But there are other aspects you can’t measure, the most important of which is impact. To give one example: on leaving the Core Exhibition, a Polish gentleman remarked, “You know? This is a museum of Polish history.” A Polish museum without being a history of the Polish state or the Polish nation! I took his remark as saying that there is more than one way of being Polish. I hope that visitors will also discover that there is more than one way of being Jewish.

Then there is international recognition. We won the 2016 European Museum of the Year Award and the 2016 European Museum Academy Prize. No other museum in Poland has won the main EMYA prize, and none of them have won those two awards in a single year. These are just two of the more than 60 Polish and international awards garnered by POLIN Museum in its first 10 years. So much for awards. There is also the vote of confidence that comes from European Union funding and large multiyear grants the EEA and Norway Grants, which are funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.

I take it as a point of pride that we are a Polish museum on a world stage. We collaborate with international partners, be they museums, research institutes, universities, cultural organizations, or advocacy organizations committed to social justice. I take those relationships as another measure of success. That funding and those relationships underpin our ambitious and innovative Education Department, one of the largest in any Jewish museum, our public programs – POLIN Museum has become the place to go for interesting music – and our academic conferences, which attract wide participation from the best scholars in the field. In one word, there is something for everyone, from families with little kids to the general public.

Yet another measure of success is our standing as one of the top attractions in Warsaw, along with the Warsaw Rising Museum, the Royal Castle, and the Old City. Let’s see what happens when the Polish History Museum opens.^[1] These are some of the indicators, although I should also mention critical reception, not only media coverage and reviews, but also serious analysis and critique.

Let’s go back to the Core Exhibition. I would like to ask you, how has the exhibition changed over these 10 years? Have there been any modifications?

Yes, absolutely. I would say there are two. One is technical, the other is, as they say in Polish: merytoryczny, which I think in English translates as substantive. First of all, of course, technology has changed during the last 10 years, and also warranties are up, and equipment needs to be replaced. Upgrading the technology also gives us the opportunity to replace multimedia and interactive components. Some touch screens aren’t responsive, or the interactive interface is not delivering the visitor experience we are after, or we see room for improving the content. We are transforming some interactives into “passive AVs” for a quicker and easier way to deliver the story. Visitors may be more responsive if they don’t have to interact but can watch a short film.

Also, after 10 years, some content simply needs to be updated. The post-89 period presented a particular challenge. It is, for now, the exit experience, and it is a difficult story to tell. The space presents its own challenges: it is not a “gallery” but rather a dramatic architectural space. We cannot control the natural light, nor the ambient sound. We cannot touch the curved architectural walls. For these and other reasons, we never got this area quite the way we wanted, so now there is an opportunity to replace what was there, still within the original concept, but better. The concept was for visitors to “meet” Jews living in Poland. Video interviews with them explored a series of questions. Is there a future for Jews in Poland? Did you always know you were Jewish? There was also a panoramic film about Jewish presence in Polish consciousness. Given the light and sound issues, the quality of these multimedia presentations was not optimal. We decided to keep the overall concept but to address the technical issues, update the interviews, and approach the Jewish presence theme in a different way.

First, Joanna Fikus, head of our Exhibition Department, had the inspired idea to commission Mikołaj Grynberg to film a whole new set of interviews. They are exquisite. Second, we worked with WWAA, a Warsaw architectural studio – they’re marvelous designers – to create a whole new installation. They developed a dedicated structure for the video interviews that lets us control light and sound and also provide seating. Third, facing the interviews is a large painting that Wilhelm Sasnal gifted to POLIN Museum. It perfectly captures the message we wanted to communicate about Jewish presence in Polish consciousness through a powerful work of art, rather than in a documentary way. While keeping the concept the same, the new installation delivers a more compelling and comfortable visitor experience. Of course, 10 years later, the interviews are quite different, so we have also updated the content.

These 10 years also provide us with an opportunity to view the Core Exhibition from a more critical perspective. Undoubtedly, there are many aspects that can be considered successes, but I would like to ask you, what would you identify as its failure?

We could have done better on antisemitism. We decided at the outset that we would not have separate sections on particular topics (Judaism, women, antisemitism, etc.), and that we would not treat these subjects transhistorically – a thousand-year history of Polish antisemitism, for example. Nor would we treat such subjects ahistorically, for example, in answer to the question “What is Judaism?”. Instead, we would thread these topics through the exhibition’s historical narrative and deal with them in historically specific ways. That said, we know where we failed and must do better. One of those places is in the 19th century gallery in the space dedicated to pogroms, blood libels, and antisemitic agitation during the second half of the 19th century. The space is simply too small, which makes it extremely difficult to deliver the content, which is excellent, in an impactful way, but we will do better because we must.

The second place we failed is at the end of the 19th century gallery, the period of the Russian Revolution. This story was to have been presented in a short film, a “passive AV,” but time did not permit, and the designers created a graphic manual interactive instead. Hopeless. The historian for that section has been urging us to install the film that was originally planned. He also wishes that we had paid greater attention to the rise of antisemitism in the Second Polish Republic, especially during the late 1930s after the death of Piłsudski. We do address the topic along a timeline, but more is needed. Where we do a good job, a really good job, is in the postwar years gallery, specifically the way we deal with violence in the period 1946–1948, especially but not only the Kielce pogrom. Indeed, antisemitism is what most concerns the public intellectuals who have criticized the Core Exhibition – namely, that there is not enough attention to this topic. We should be poking our finger in the eye of the Polish public and making sure they face this ugly truth. That’s not how we approach the exhibition and not how we approach our public, although I would agree that we could do a better job.

Turning now to Jews and communism, we deal with the topic but not as fully as is needed. We cover all the bases, but covering all the bases doesn’t mean impact. It is not that the topic is missing, but rather that it could have greater impact by being both more visible and developed in greater depth. So that would be another example.

Related to these issues is another criticism, namely, that the exhibition lacks a strong curatorial voice and that we, the scholars and curators, should clearly state where we stand. We should ensure that the visitor gets the message, the right message. In contrast, we offer an open narrative in a variety of voices from the period who speak in their own words from primary sources. Our critics fault this approach the curators and historians “hiding” behind the quoted excerpts. Of course, we chose the sources, we chose the excerpts, and we set them in relation to one another they are the playscript in our theater of history – and we encourage our visitors to add their voice to the story. Our goal is to keep visitors in the historical present of the story and work against the teleological drive to the Holocaust. That event is inevitably the lens through which visitors would otherwise experience the thousand-year history. In a word, our approach is authoritative without being authoritarian.

We were also asked by one of Poland’s more prominent public intellectuals, who is also Jewish: “Where is Judaism?”. He recommended getting rid of the Forest, a poetic entrance experience, and replacing it with a “Judaism pill” that would introduce visitors to “Judaism” even before they enter the historical narrative. Here too we rejected the proposal to create a separate transhistorical treatment of the topic. We wanted to avoid a normative approach to Judaism, opting instead to thread the topic of “Jewish religious life” throughout the historical narrative. He could not see it because he was looking for a “somewhere” for Judaism. Instead, we presented Jewish religious life everywhere, not normatively, but as contingent and specific to a particular period and place, stressing its dynamism and diversity. We were also asked to provide an answer to the question “What is a Jew?”, even before visitors would enter the historical narrative. Again, we refused. Visitors would find the answer to that question in the exhibition itself and discover the many ways of being Jewish. I recall that the Jewish Museum in London did provide two text panels asking and answering those questions at the entrance to their Judaica gallery. I read them every time I visited that museum, and to this day, I cannot remember a word.

Then there are some parts of the exhibition that were never finished. I am thinking of the part dealing with theater and cinema in the interwar years gallery. We prepared a beautiful scenario for a film that we’re now going to produce.

Finally, there is a call for more original objects, and we agree. We are continually adding ones from our growing collection. Polish visitors are especially keen to see original objects and expect to see them when they go to a museum. I love the Museum of Warsaw’s new permanent exhibition, which is all original objects. They have taken an analog approach and as a matter of principle do not use multimedia, with the rare exception. I think what they have done is wonderful. I am also happy that POLIN Museum is building the collection and gradually replacing copies and loans with original objects and especially objects from our collection. We’re doing that all the time.

One of the critical voices that intrigued me was the text about the gender category as an analytical tool. When we examine the history presented in the exhibition, I would like to ask you, what are your thoughts on it?

Honestly, I don’t agree with this criticism at all. First, we don’t take a census approach, counting the number of women in the story, how often, and how prominently. Second, like our approach to antisemitism and Judaism, we do not have a separate transhistorical section on women, but thread women’s roles, experience, and achievements throughout the entire historical narrative. Women are to be found not in one “somewhere” but everywhere, right from the very start. They are an integral part of the story, not concentrated in a separate section. Rachela Fiszl, matriarch of an illustrious banking family, is prominent in the medieval gallery. The earliest books printed in Yiddish were intended for women; they were manuals of moral and ethical instruction, and we feature them in the gallery dedicated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth period. The gallery dedicated to the Jewish town in the 18th century features women in the tavern business, in the synagogue, in the cemetery, and at home, with special attention to both their economic role and their distinctive forms of piety, among other aspects. Prominent women in the 19th century gallery, among them Puah Rakovsky and Rosa Luxemburg, but also working women, both in small workshops and in big factories. In the galleries that follow there are women writers, artists, political activists, and others, among them Rachela Auerbach, Paulina Appenszlak, and Alina Szapocznikow, and youth autobiographies that were authored by young women. We are of course sensitive to the ways in which women have been written out of history, and we know that if we go with a business-as-usual approach, we too would be writing women out of history. But in being sensitive to that pitfall, we don’t want to make the mistake of “writing them in.” Rather, we take a contingent and integral approach: on the one hand, women appear where and when they are playing a decisive role in the historical narrative; on the other hand, we want to communicate their experience as women in all its diversity. Keep in mind that the exhibition is not a scholarly essay in a feminist studies journal but an intellectually coherent exploration of the history of Polish Jews for the general public. Underpinning every choice that we made is an intellectual justification, but there are no footnotes. You wouldn’t do that in theater, you wouldn’t do that in opera or film, and we do not do it in our theater of history.

Some of the criticism is warranted, and I take these concerns seriously. Other critics are really calling for a different exhibition. They reject our donnée, our starting point, and the solutions they propose – the “Judaism pill,” making antisemitism a major focus of the historical narrative, replacing the “first-person” mode of narration with a strong curatorial voice holding visitors to account, among others – that would be the ruination of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition.

What is your current role at POLIN like?

Since the pandemic, I haven’t been able to travel, but I have been able to work remotely. We meet by Zoom, we exchange documents, discuss, and work on them. So I’m working full time from New York, although I hope to be able to come to Poland for the opening of the exhibition (po)ŻYDOWSKIE… Sztetl Opatów oczami Majera Kirszenblata ('[post]JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt') in May 2024 and for the 10th anniversary of POLIN Museum’s Grand Opening in September. We’ll see.

In recent years, there has been an observed increase in the number of historical museums in Poland. Some of these museums are notably controversial, exhibiting an authoritarian nature and lacking recognition from authorities in the field. What role does POLIN Museum play on the contemporary map of museums in Poland?

Let me share the perspective of a Polish gentleman who years ago, not long after the museum opened, commented as he left (I paraphrase): “You know, this is a museum of Polish history.” Yet, the story that POLIN Museum presents is not a history of the Polish state or the Polish nation; it is a history of one of the many groups – religious, cultural, and regional – that made up the diversity of Poland in the past. That diversity was the norm before the Holocaust. His comment was a way saying that there is more than one way of being Polish. I hope that visitors also discover that there is more than one way of being Jewish. This is an incredibly important message. That’s first.

Second, not long after we were officially founded, around 2007 as I recall, there was a public debate about a proposal to create a Museum of Polish History. Those against the proposal said that there was no need for a museum of Polish history because all museums in Poland were museums of Polish history. Those in favor said that without a museum of Polish history, POLIN Museum would be the only museum of Polish history – all one thousand years. In fact, you could say that the Museum of Polish History, which will soon open, developed in reaction to POLIN Museum. That positions POLIN Museum in a very interesting way, as a museum of Polish history.

Third, Dariusz Stola positions POLIN Museum within the unfinished project of moral reckoning. Polish society today is not responsible for what our ancestors and neighbors in the past did, but we are responsible for what we do with that knowledge. POLIN is a place for raising historical awareness and taking responsibility for what we do with the knowledge that we have. We have a very special role to play in that regard, and we are willing and able to take this responsibility, one of the reasons Wilhelm Sasnal wanted to exhibit his works with us.

Returning again to our approach of being authoritative, without being authoritarian. To be trusted, we must be historically correct and intellectually coherent. We must be critical of our own practice, our own ways of working, the choices we make. We are our worst critics. I could go down the list of all the things we think we could have done better or done differently or not at all – what to leave out is as important as what to keep in.

The intellectual coherence that sets POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition apart from many other museums, not only in Poland, but elsewhere is largely thanks to Jerzy Halbersztadt, who supported a process that most museums would not or could not adopt for reasons of time and money, namely workshops that brought academics, curators, and designers together every step of the way – when funds were not available to continue working with the designers, out academic and curatorial team continued to work on the content. At other museums, it is more common for academics to be consultants during the early phase of the process. The museum’s curator provides the exhibition designers with the material, and the exhibition designers deliver the exhibition, subject to the client’s review and approval. Our process of making the exhibition took more time, and was more costly, but it allowed for exceptionally rigorous debate. Also, we had a big academic team. The intellectual work that underpinned all the decisions was really exceptional, not only because of the team’s historical expertise, but also because of their historiographic sophistication. In addition, they were good storytellers. The team was international (Poland, United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom) and multidisciplinary. It included not only historians, but also art historians, an anthropologist, sociologist, philosopher, and social psychologist, and all of them were excellent communicators. This was not “we’ll give you the content, you make the exhibition.” No, that’s not how it worked.

In your opinion, has Jewish history become integrated into Polish collective memory? Do you think that the history of Jews will be an integral part of the Polish History Museum?

First, I think that during the last 25 years or so, maybe longer, there has been a paradigm shift in Poland. Maybe this is why our exhibition has been criticized for being “American.” Until relatively recently, the history of Polish Jews as studied in Poland was not a history of Polish Jews, but rather a history of Polish–Jewish relations, which I see as a history of Poles and their relation to Jews. It was based almost entirely on Polish sources. Before 1989, few scholars could read Hebrew and Yiddish, and only after 1989 did intellectual exchange with scholars in Israel and the United States open up. In contrast, a history of Polish Jews is a history in which Jews are agents in their own history and not simply objects on which others project their fantasies and fears. That is a completely different approach. Does that make it “American”? Or simply international, with different schools of thought. After all, Polish scholars today read Hebrew and Yiddish. They collaborate internationally, and their intellectual horizons are broader. Of course, those who came before also did excellent work, but in a different paradigm.

As for the Polish History Museum, I understand that it is committed to presenting minorities, and they will include Jews. But what they will do, and how they will do it, I have no idea.

How does working in the field of history and memory in Poland differ from similar work in other regions of the world?

First, Poland was the epicenter of the genocide. As a result, the material traces of industrialized murder are here: the death camps, the mass graves. Germany, that was the land of the perpetrators, the headquarters. Outside of Europe, those are the lands of the survivors. Holocaust memory in North America, Australia, and Israel is first and foremost a survivor project. They were the ones to establish Holocaust museums, and they continue to be at the center of these projects to this day, despite their diminishing numbers. In Poland, there are of course survivors, but the fact that they remained in Poland makes them survivors of a different order. Then there are those in Poland who were involved in or who witnessed the genocide, and their descendants. They have to come to terms with what they did, saw, or know. Everyone has to live with evidence of the genocide across the Polish landscape and reckon with this difficult past.

These factors are further complicated by the painful image of Poland as antisemitic. Poland doesn’t have a monopoly, of course, there is a history of antisemitism in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States, among others, but it is Poland that suffers most from this terrible stigma. That said, there are fearless scholars, artists, journalists, and curators who are addressing the most difficult topics, and POLIN Museum works with them – artist Wilhelm Sasnal, historian Barbara Engelking and the Polish Center for Holocaust Research she founded and directs, journalist Anna Bikont, and artist Natalia Romik, among others. Each in their own way is trying to move Polish society forward in addressing these issues. Awakening memory, raising historical awareness, and shifting from a memory culture predicated on indictment to a memory culture that finds a place for self-indictment – these are the goals. That’s what happened in Germany, which almost everybody praises, but you cannot compare Germany and Poland. Polish society has to find its own way to reconcile what it suffered with its complicity in the suffering of their Jewish neighbors, and not only focus on the heroic efforts of some Poles to save their Jewish neighbors.

After the attacks in April 2023, which targeted Barbara Engelking during the celebration of the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many people started questioning whether conducting reliable and critical research on the Holocaust in present-day Poland is even possible. What is your opinion?

Today is not April 2023, but even under PiS,^[2] rigorous research on the Holocaust continued. Polish scholars dedicated to the truth are simply fearless. That said, it was only with the rise of PiS did I see something for the first time. During the decades that we were creating POLIN Museum, we were trusted to be accurate and fair – every mayor of Warsaw, no matter of which political party, supported us. That changed under PiS, thanks to their historical policy of defending the good name of Poland. Museums were to follow that policy and not be “modern” like POLIN Museum, which encourages debate. As a result, whenever we dealt with a sensitive topic, be it antisemitism or March ‘68, for example, one word that came up that I don’t recall ever hearing in the whole time we were creating POLIN Museum: “anti-Polish.” When we touched a sensitive topic, no matter how balanced, reasonable, and historically accurate, we were “anti-Polish.” We were not defending the good name of Poland, quite the opposite, in the view of our detractors. That was new. Maybe that thinking existed, but it was marginal; now it was part of the government’s historical policy. A new government was recently installed, which doesn’t mean that PiS will go away, far from it. Basia has always worked against the grain; there has probably never been a time when she hasn’t come under attack, she and Jan Grabowski and Jan Gross, and many others. Nothing will stop them. They will not stop working on the Holocaust and addressing the most painful issues. Even the attempt to put Jan Gross on trial failed. No, nothing will stop them. And nothing will stop us either. At the same time, when President Duda went to Israel and was asked about antisemitism in Poland, he’d say, “What do you mean, antisemitism? Look at our beautiful POLIN Museum.”

I admire your enthusiasm and optimism. Let’s move on to the last point. How has your experience working at the POLIN Museum influenced both your personal and professional life?

I cannot tell you how much I loved living in Poland. Of course, I can never go back to my father’s Poland. If I could time travel to his Poland, that would be the dream of a lifetime. But that’s not possible. And 21st century Warsaw couldn’t be more different from his town before the Holocaust. Nonetheless, living in Poland was just wonderful, no matter good politics or bad politics. I treasure the friends that I made and the colleagues that I got to work with. But also, just daily life. All the markets, all the wonderful berries, the currants, plums, and mushrooms, and the bakeries, the bread. So much changed since 2002, when I first came to Warsaw to consult on the museum project, the restaurants then and now – no comparison. Just getting to travel around Poland as we were doing research for the Core Exhibition was divine.

What I loved most was this very slow, almost molecular, way of absorbing Poland, no quick takes, no big ideas, insights, or conclusions. I was taking everything in through my pores, often without understanding or thinking; it was more about absorbing the experience and deepening a sense of what it meant to be there. That was the biggest element, personally. Professionally, I have developed new thoughts about museums. That was one of my goals, and it happened. The opportunity to be part of the creation of POLIN Museum and to live in Poland was a gift, and for that I will be forever grateful.