My presentation sets out to explore the street as a vehicle of remembering and forgetting, based on the example of site of the former Warsaw ghetto, which Jacek Leociak's aptly calls "miejsce-po-getcie" (2001). Rather than study official commemorative practices, I will refer to The Polin Museum's current exhibition Tu Muranów (2020) and Danuta Halladin's documentary Moja Ulica (My Street 1965) to foreground the street and the urban grid as triggers for the formation of what Alison Landsberg calls prosthetic memories (2004). Transmitted and acquired in the form of mass-mediated digital representations, such memories mobilize affect, fostering intimate encounters with the past and historical knowledge; they can change a person's consciousness as well as "open up collective horizons of experience and pave the way for unexpected political alliances" Organized around the street grid as a major narrative axis, Tu Muranów invites visitors to explore their own connectedness with a place whose pre-war buildings were razed to the ground, creating a mnemonic void. One way in which the exhibition invests the mnemonic void with the place's Jewish past is by means of a symbolic reconstruction of Nalewki Street. The exhibition opens with a minimalist two-layered grid on the museum wall – the post-WWII street plan superimposed on the pre-war grid of the Jewish quarter – confronting visitors with difficult questions, asking them to address collective traumas, provoking visceral experiences, and encouraging critical thinking.
By contrast, the 1965 film My Street uses Twarda Street as an anchor for a future-oriented vision of urban progress, modernization, and post-war renewal. Halladin deliberately started out with the recorded narratives of local schoolchildren about their street, and shot street scenes to illustrate the voiceover. Although the street, lined with war-torn dilapidated tenements, is located within the former limits of the Warsaw ghetto, "their street," as described by the children, is immersed in the present. Thus, the children function as agents of forgetting, oblivious of the place's violent past and of the Jewish population's erasure from the urban landscape. Halladin's use of the children allows her to naturalize the forward-looking vision.
