This project was carried out in collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (IT), on the occasion of the exhibition Fallen Angels by Anselm Kiefer.
Published in Microcosmo magazine, 2024.

Memories of a Forest

It was the year 1939. Invaded by the German and Soviet armies, Poland was divided between the two powers. In October, Governor General Hans Frank ordered the mobilisation of the pre-war Polish police in the service of the German authorities. The police officers were to report for duty; those who did not oblige would be shot. Kazimierz, my great-grandfather’s younger brother, presented himself. The organisation was officially dissolved on 27 August 1944. Later, many of them were classified as collaborationists and traitors; only after the 1989 revolutions in Poland were many officers rehabilitated.
Kazimierz often sent letters home to Podwysokie from the police station in Lipsko, where he was serving. The last one was dated 8 July 1944. He recounted the passing of life and how much he missed his family. He spoke of the fiancée he wanted to marry as soon as the war was over and his plans and dreams for the future. He wished to live a life far from the bitterness of war, perhaps in Canada. Kazimierz knew staying in Poland after the war would be risky, even impossible. He knew he would be persecuted for collaborationism.
For his wedding, he had ordered a suit from the tailor, took his bicycle, and went to pick it up. All he had to do was ride through the woods, but for us, he never came out of those woods. What happened there? Did he manage to escape, or was he killed?
What remains of that severed time? Questions to which we will no longer know the answers. A photograph, a trace of light produced by reality, where time and light are divided, no longer getting along. What remains is a recollection that becomes memory.
In my short story, I address the theme of suspended time. I speak of broken orders of love and the permanence of memory as the most powerful soother against the sense of transience. I speak of remembering as a way of remaining sewn to the fabric of life. I reflect on the theme of wounds, which I wish I could repair with gold as in the ancient Japanese kintsugi technique, reassembling fragments and shattered pieces, embellishing the scars and thus giving them a new appearance, a new soul.