Next Door to Pola Gojawiczyńska

Organised as part of the Year of Pola Gojawiczyńska in Mazovia, the exhibition presents the writer’s life in the interwar period, when she lived on Brzozowa Street.

The year 2026 marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of Pola Gojawiczyńska, a native of Warsaw and an outstanding Polish novelist and short story writer with a close knowledge of working-class and lower middle-class circles, known above all as the author of the Warsaw duology Girls of Nowolipki and The Paradise Apple Tree. She was also an important figure in the literary life of the capital as it was rebuilt after the war.

Through stills from the 1937 film directed by Lejtes, Girls of Nowolipki, an adaptation of Gojawiczyńska’s novel of the same title, the museum shows the Warsaw of that time, and its poor districts in particular. It also recalls the hard years of the Second World War, showing through her work that period and the people with whom she shared its hardships. Special attention is given to the novel Krata, about the women prisoners of Pawiak, a book based on her own experience, as the writer herself was imprisoned there in 1943. The display presents items left by the writer and gathered by the museum: manuscripts and printed editions of her literary debuts.