Museum of the Warsaw Rising

John Radzilowski has written a fascinating review of the Museum of the Warsaw Rising in the most recent issue of The Public Historian.[1]

Radzilowski's review provides an overview of the weaknesses and strengths of the museum. He finds that the primary weakness is that the museum requires a visitor to have some kind of prior knowledge of the event in order to make sense of displays that are often disjointed and that lack a clear spatial-chronological relationship. The strengths that he finds are that the museum reflects an important event in World War II that is under-appreciated outside of Poland but that served as an important prelude to the Cold War. Additionally, the museum serves an important role for Poles by serving as a site for commemoration and for foreigners by "attempting to rebuild a coherent historical memory of the darkest period in Polish history, marked by both trauma and heroism."

To learn more about the Warsaw Rising, see the museum's website, and this site.


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[1] John Radzilowski, "Remembrance and Recovery: The Museum of the Warsaw Rising and the Memory of World War II in Post-Communist Poland," The Public Historian 31: 4 (Nov. 2009), 143-158.

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