Journey to Poland

Maurizio Cinquegrani’s book is a highly illuminating and entirely engrossing account of little-known documentary films about the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland. He provides excellent close readings of his chosen films, and explores them in relation to what he aptly calls the ‘cinematic topography’ of genocidal events. Cinquegrani analyses the market-places, attics and courtyards which appear as emblems of pre-war life, and as the sites of wartime atrocities, for survivors returning to the villages and cities of their birth, as well as the filmed terrain of the extermination camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. By this means, Cinquegrani’s outstanding book reveals the persistence of the past in the present through his arguing for the profoundly geographical nature of Holocaust memory. -- Professor Sue Vice, University of Sheffield