Journey to Poland

Maurizio Cinquegrani is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Kent and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has written widely about film, memory, history and place and his work includes the monographs Of Empire and the City: Remapping Early British Cinema (2014) and Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust (2018).

Maurizio Cinquegrani’s book is a highly illuminating and entirely engrossing account of little-known documentary films about the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland. He provides excellent close readings of his chosen films, and explores them in relation to what he aptly calls the ‘cinematic topography’ of genocidal events. Cinquegrani analyses the market-places, attics and courtyards which appear as emblems of pre-war life, and as the sites of wartime atrocities, for survivors returning to the villages and cities of their birth, as well as the filmed terrain of the extermination camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. By this means, Cinquegrani’s outstanding book reveals the persistence of the past in the present through his arguing for the profoundly geographical nature of Holocaust memory.

• Prologue - Space, Time, and the HolocaustChapter One - Countryside, shtetl, city: the murders of Mazovia, Jedwabne, and KielceChapter Two - Conflicting memories in the shtetlekh Gąbin, Suchowola, Brańsk, and Luboml Chapter Three - The marketplaces of postmemory in the shtetlekh Eishyshok, Delatyn, Opatów, Zdunska Wola, Urzejowice, and Pińczów Chapter Four - A tale of two cities: Warsaw and KrakówChapter Five - Another tale of two cities: Lviv and ŁódźChapter Six - A tale of two cities of death: Treblinka and OświęcimEpilogue - new routesBibliographyFilmographyIllustrationsAcknowledgements