Haunted by the Holocaust: The Ghosts of Muranow made visible

The ghosts of Muranow: A journalist's mission to illuminate Poland's haunted past
 By Donald Snyder, NBC News Special Correspondent
 23 Nov 2012

The report begins:

When Polish journalist Beata Chomatowska walks the streets of Muranow, she can’t stop thinking about the horrible things that happened there.

“It’s a daily trauma,” she said.

Present-day Muranow, a district of Warsaw, Poland, is built on rubble and the remains of Jews who perished there during World War II, but many residents are ignorant of the area’s past.

So Chomatowska started a website to educate them called “Stacja Muranow,” which means “Muranow Stop.” And in October she published a book by the same name, chronicling the haunted past of the former Jewish ghetto.

  The stories of the perished, of survivors, of the restoration of historical memory are all interesting.  As yesterday was Zamenhof's birthday, I will point out the following:

Thirty residents have joined Chomatowska’s Muranow education project, meeting in an unfurnished office with no hint of the past. She’s particularly proud of one of the murals painted by members of the group in the entry way of an apartment building. It features prominent Jews who lived in Muranow before the war, such as the creator of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhoff, who hoped his universal language would unite people of different cultures.

 All of Zamenhof's children were murdered by the Nazis, but one grandson survived. I had the opportunity to meet Zamenhof's great-granddaughter, now living in Louisiana.

Stacja Muranow [Muranow Station] is a book published in Polish on this project.

Courtesy of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, you can take an audio walking tour of Muranow in Polish.

And here is the web site devoted to the district: Stacja Muranów strona o Muranowie.