Publishing Department

The publication contains a wide selection of posters, photographs, posters, drawings, and paintings by Polish and Jewish artists who commemorated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in this way. The authors of the essays present completely new findings, allowing, among other things, to look at the aesthetics of socialist realism differently than as an unwanted heritage. The book is complemented by an anthology of poems devoted to the uprising.

It was less than ten years ago that I first saw socialist-realist oil paintings from the 1950s dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. That was when I began work at the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI). […] I well remember the moment when we came across those giant canvases. They were hanging at the very end of a spacious room, banished to a place where they would be least in the way. We were nevertheless aware that in many respects, those dubious creations of a discarded collective past required serious consideration.

from an essay by Michał Krasicki

We are dealing with an original, largely pioneering study that combines documentary reliability with methodological innovation and interpretative courage. The book is a coherent and, at the same time, multidimensional work in the history of art, blazing new trails in research on the ways of visual representation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (and more broadly: the Holocaust) in the first years after the war in Poland.

from the review by Prof. Jacek Leociak

The publication accompanies the exhibition Monuments to Resistance. Art on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943-1956), curators: Marta Kapeluś, Michał Krasicki, Piotr Słodkowski.

You can buy the book here

The book was published thanks to funding from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.