Aleksandra Kossowska – Photojournalist Based in Warsaw

Two fragments of a past life that my grandmother, Helena, entrusted to her six-year-old son — my father, Marian — when they fled the ruins of Warsaw after the fall of the Uprising. The three of them set out together: my grandmother, my father, and his eleven-year-old brother, Witek. They found shelter in the countryside near Grójec, with someone who had promised to help. My father used to say that the alarm clock never stopped ringing — even when they hid from air raids in a roadside ditch.

My grandfather, Kazimierz, thirty-two at the time, was executed by the Germans on the third day of the Uprising. We never learned where he was buried. Around the same time, his relatives were also killed: his sister Zofia lost her husband, Marian, and their fifteen-year-old son, Miecio — murdered before her eyes. Her older son, twenty-year-old Jurek Nitka — codename “Dąb” — fought in the Baszta battalion. He was killed on August 24.

Only one photograph of the boys — Jurek and Miecio — has survived, taken before the war at the Venus photography studio on 23 Puławska Street. There is also a preserved wedding portrait of Marian and Zofia, made at Chomski’s “Ursus” studio at Plac Trzech Krzyży. Among other photographs taken by my grandfather Kazimierz — an avid amateur photographer who loved to capture his loved ones with his Leica — there might be later portraits of them as well. Sadly, we can no longer recognize all the faces.

This is the story of my family during the Warsaw Uprising — a story I would like to tell more fully.Just as walls absorb memory and bear witness to what they have seen, the photo album has preserved traces of remembrance. I selected several photographs: portraits of Zofia, Marian, Jurek, Miecio, my grandfather Kazimierz, my grandmother Helena, and my father, Marian. I photographed them against the wall of a tenement house at 14 Grottgera Street, where bullet marks from the Uprising can still be seen. My family lived on this street for many years.