Forgotten - Lower Silesia

More than twenty years of one photographer’s journeys through the villages and small towns of Lower Silesia, the region in south-western Poland that was German until 1945: palaces, spas, chapels and cemeteries left behind by the people who once lived there, next to houses where ordinary life goes on today. It was a short run, 2 to 30 October 2026, at the Museum of Independence’s main building on al. Solidarności 62.

The Museum of Independence on the exhibition (translated from the Polish original):

After the Second World War, Lower Silesia changed profoundly. The region’s former inhabitants were expelled, and their place was taken by newcomers from many directions - among others from the Eastern Borderlands and central Poland. The new communities had to find their footing in a space whose history they often did not know. Many places lost their former users, and with them part of their memory. For more than twenty years Radek Jaworski has been photographing this changing landscape. He returns to small villages and towns, but also to the larger places of Lower Silesia. He looks for what is easy to overlook: a fragment of an old inscription, a bricked-up window, the remains of an old chapel, an abandoned palace or a building slowly being taken over by plants.

His photographs, however, do not show only ruins. Next to crumbling buildings there are places still lived in, renovated and put to new use. An old German inscription may sit next to a modern car, and an old ruin next to the new life that grows up around it.

What to expect

A single-author photography show, curated by Marzena Jaworska, in the baroque Przebendowski/Radziwiłł Palace. The museum did not say which room it hung in or how many prints it showed. The catalogue reproduces 30 photographs taken between 2009 and 2025 in a restrained monochrome palette.

The catalogue published by the museum (in Polish) pointed to what to look for:

• The Calvary on Holy Mountain in Lubawka (2023) - Stations of the Cross chapels without doors and partly without roofs, swallowed by the forest; four views in the catalogue, including the neo-Gothic Chapel of the Last Supper of 1892.
• Princess Marianne of the Netherlands’ palace in Kamieniec Ząbkowicki (2025) - a neo-Gothic residence designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and burnt out in 1946; three interiors set former splendour against bare brick and today’s restoration.
• Dr Brehmer’s sanatorium in Sokołowsko (2017) - opened in 1855 as one of the first modern lung-disease spas in Europe; the catalogue presents it as a place being brought back, not only as a ruin.
• The castle in Świecie (2011) - a ruin that its private owners have been rebuilding for years without help from large institutions.
• The First World War memorial in Płóczki Górne (2011) - a stone obelisk with the names of the village’s dead, whose descendants had to leave after 1945.

The catalogue (86 pages, ISBN 978-83-68378-32-0, in Polish) was published by the museum as a free PDF. Marzena Jaworska’s essay on the memory of landscape in the photographs and Marta Brodala’s on the first years of Polish Lower Silesia give the pictures the background the frames alone could not.

Context

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945 the Allies moved Poland’s border west, and Lower Silesia, with Wrocław (formerly Breslau), became Polish. By 1950 some 3.5 million Germans had been expelled from these so-called Recovered Territories. The people who replaced them came from Poland’s lost eastern lands (now in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania), from central Poland and from émigré communities abroad, among them France, and most knew nothing of the houses they moved into. Jaworski, born in Wrocław in 1970, is a child of that resettlement: according to the catalogue his father came from Polesia and his mother from Upper Silesia. The series was shown earlier, among other places, in August 2025 in the crypt of a church in Modliszewko near Gniezno (in Polish). In Warsaw the honorary patron was Martin Kremer, Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Wrocław, who also wrote the catalogue’s foreword.

Tickets and time

• Hours: the exhibition was open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-17:00 (10 AM - 5 PM); the exhibitions were closed on Mondays.
• Tickets: the museum listed no separate price for the show; the museum admission ticket applied: 20 PLN regular, 10 PLN reduced, 1 PLN with the Polish Large Family Card (Karta Dużej Rodziny).
• Thursdays: entry was free with a free ticket; the museum stated this for the whole museum and did not mention temporary shows separately.
• English on site: the museum’s pages said nothing about English labels for this show; both of its posts about the exhibition, and the catalogue, exist only in Polish.

Events

• 2.10.2026, 18:00 - opening at the museum’s main building, al. Solidarności 62, after the exhibitions closed at 17:00.
• 16.10.2026, 14:00 - meeting with the photographer and a curator-led tour of the exhibition at the Przebendowski/Radziwiłł Palace, announced in the museum’s events programme for October 2026 (in Polish).

The dates and the patronage were given in the museum’s announcement of the opening (in Polish) and in the invitation the museum sent to our editors on 24 September 2026; the date of the meeting with the photographer comes from the museum’s events programme for October 2026 (in Polish).

Updates

• 2 November 2026: the exhibition closed on 30 October 2026; the museum announced no extension.

After the show

On now at the Museum of Independence: the museum has no other current temporary exhibition described on this site, since the other temporary show in the building, “Echoes of the Great War”, also closed on 30 October 2026, and visiting information and the permanent exhibition “Polonia Restituta” are covered in the museum profile.

Related exhibitions on now elsewhere in Warsaw:

• Kresowe koleje losu. Marking 80 Years Since the Expatriation - at the Station Museum, with no closing date given by the museum; a show on the fate of Poles forcibly resettled from the eastern borderlands after the Second World War, staged inside a century-old covered wagon, telling the other side of the post-war migration that made the new Lower Silesia in Jaworski’s photographs.
• Adolph Menzel (1815-1905). The Tireless Observer - at the National Museum in Warsaw until 13 December 2026; the first monographic exhibition in Poland of the 19th-century German artist also takes up provenance, since part of the museum’s Menzel drawings and prints come from pre-war German collections that became Polish property after the border changes of 1945.

Museum profile: Museum of Independence.