Ludu, bój się

Until 15 September 2026 the foyer of POLIN Museum’s Education Centre showed “Ludu, bój się” (“People, Be Afraid”), an exhibition made by fourteen young people.

The exhibition presented a personal, contemporary perspective of young people on the history of the Holocaust and the memory of violence. No official English title has been published by the museum - the name above is a descriptive gloss, not an official translation. The show grew out of CoREM (Collective Remembrance: Engaging Youth Through Curatorial Practices), an international project co-funded by the European Commission and run in parallel in Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia and Spain. Participants were not passive learners - they took on the role of curators themselves, reinterpreting the museum’s own source material and asking difficult questions, partly through performance and body-based methods.

Creators and curators: Hanna Czarnik, Karolina Kacprzak, Piotr Krawczyk, Liliana Krupa, Maciej Leśniak, Wiktor Masny, Anastazja Maślak, Anastasiia Melnyk, Nikola Pietroń, Izabela Smyk, Łukasz Sosnowski, Z. Strzelczyk, Klara Szlanta and Zofia Wiergiles.

What to expect

The exhibition was on the 1st floor of POLIN Museum, in the Education Centre foyer. Admission was free and no advance reservation was needed.

This was not a conventional historical show curated by museum staff - it was a young people’s perspective, built over several months of working with POLIN’s own source material into an independent narrative about memory and violence.

More about the CoREM project on POLIN Museum’s website (in Polish).

Context

CoREM is led by Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona; its partners include the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, POLIN Museum and the University of Wrocław. It is co-funded by the European Union’s Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme and looks at how the memory of genocides is passed on through curatorial work. According to a University of Wrocław announcement of 26 September 2025, the museums in the project were to develop exhibitions on difficult pasts together with young people - “Ludu, bój się” was the Warsaw result of that work. The museum’s invitation to the opening was passed on by, among others, a Warsaw photography school, Zespół Szkół Fototechnicznych (9 June 2026) (in Polish).

After the show

No further showing or accompanying publication has been announced (as of 16 September 2026).

On now in Warsaw:

• POLIN Museum core exhibition - 1,000 years of Polish Jewish history in eight galleries, from the Middle Ages to the present; admission is free on Thursdays.
• Images of Identity. The Collection of Berlin’s Pre-War Jewish Museum - another answer to the question of memory: the surviving picture archive of a museum closed down after the November 1938 pogrom, at the Jewish Historical Institute until 30 November 2026.
• Warsaw - September 1939. Woodcuts by Eugeniusz Pichell - the violence of war in prints, shown inside the former Gestapo jail at the Mausoleum of Struggle and Martyrdom; the museum gives no closing date.

Museum profile: POLIN Museum.