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 is 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 has not said which room it will hang in or how many prints it will show. The catalogue reproduces 30 photographs taken between 2009 and 2025 in a restrained monochrome palette, so expect one quiet room rather than a career survey.

The catalogue published by the museum (in Polish) points 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) is a free PDF on the museum’s website. If you read Polish, skim it before you go: 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 cannot.

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 is Martin Kremer, Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Wrocław, who also wrote the catalogue’s foreword.

Tickets and time

• Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10:00-17:00 (10 AM - 5 PM), exhibitions closed on Mondays.
• Tickets: the museum lists no separate price for the show; admission to the museum is 20 PLN regular, 10 PLN reduced, 1 PLN with the Polish Large Family Card (Karta Dużej Rodziny).
• Free on Thursdays with a free ticket. The museum states this for the whole museum and does not mention temporary shows separately; to check, call +48 22 826 90 91 or write to sekretariat@muzn.pl.
• Online tickets: Museum of Independence ticket shop.
• Getting there: the palace stands in the middle of al. Solidarności, about five minutes’ walk west of Ratusz-Arsenał station on metro line M1, on the edge of the Old Town.
• How long: 30-45 minutes for the show if it matches the catalogue’s scale; about an hour and a half with the permanent exhibitions.
• English on site: the museum’s pages say nothing about English labels for this show. Both of its posts about the exhibition exist only in Polish, and so does the catalogue, so plan on a translation app for the captions.

Who it is for: visitors with family roots in Silesia or in Poland’s former eastern lands, anyone who knows the Sudeten mountains from hiking trips, and fans of quiet, monochrome documentary photography. If you came to the Museum of Independence for the story of how Poland regained statehood, that is in the permanent exhibitions; this show is quieter and depends on reading the captions. Go on a Thursday and pair it with the rest of the palace.

Events

• 2.10.2026, 18:00 - opening at the museum’s main building, al. Solidarności 62. The museum has not said whether entry is free or whether you need to register; the opening starts after the exhibitions close 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. The date is given in the museum’s events programme for October 2026 (in Polish); the museum does not say whether you need to register or whether the meeting is included in the ticket.

See also

• Museum of Independence - the permanent exhibition “Polonia Restituta” on 1914-1921, in the same palace, tells how Poland regained its state; Jaworski’s pictures show what the border shift of 1945 left behind.
• “Echoes of the Great War” - the other temporary show in the building, also until 30 October, on the First World War, the war commemorated by the German memorial in Płóczki Górne that Jaworski photographed.
• “Józef Czechowicz - Photographer of Vilnius” - the National Museum’s Photography Cabinet, until 13 December: 19th-century Vilnius, one of the eastern lands many of Lower Silesia’s post-war settlers came from.

The dates and the patronage are 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).

Museum profile: Museum of Independence.