Hideouts: Architecture Of Survival

We invite you to the public talk, which continues the program "From Place to Place: Stories from Scattered Archives."

After escaping from the Janowska camp, probably in 1942, Henryk Streng entered a closet to survive and hid there until 1944, when he finally left it as Marek Włodarski. What does it mean for a person to disappear, to become absent, in order to be able to exist? What does it mean for a space to fulfill a protective function and to contain information about it?

During the Holocaust, closets, walls, sewers, tree hollows, caves, and empty graves became hiding places where survival depended on temporary invisibility. At the same time, an attic had to look like an ordinary attic, and a tree like an ordinary tree. These spaces were created out of the necessity of the moment and its urgency, often in places entirely unsuitable for this purpose. At the same time, they had to remain almost unchanged in appearance to fulfill their intended function. Assembling them, ensuring secrecy or, conversely, exposing them became the responsibility of ordinary people: those who hid, sheltered and helped, or prevented and betrayed. Today, these hiding places form part of flats and residential buildings, streets, parks, or even below-ground infrastructure. Lviv is one of the cities where these hiding places and the experiences they held have become part of everyday routes. How do we live with them, alongside and within? What should we do when, without asking anyone's permission, they have become part of our personal history?

What is a hideout, and what does "hiding" mean? Are they always solely about the physical and the material? What are the consequences of hiding? Could they also refer to an emotional state, an idea, or a practice that one needs or wishes to conceal, or, for example, an archive that is concealed or hidden until it is requested and opened? What else can a hiding place contain, apart from people? What functions does it fulfill, apart from simply concealing? How does the boundary between the private and the public shift when survival is at stake? How can one explore a place that was created to remain invisible? How can one understand and work with what is absent? And what changes when it becomes visible?

The event will take place as part of the public program of the "REHERIT 2.0: Common Responsibility for Shared Heritage" project — "Weaving the Heritage". "REHERIT 2.0" is implemented by the Center for Urban History and the Regional Development Center of the PPV Economic Development Agency with the financial support of the European Union.

This publication was created with the financial assistance of the European Union. Its content is the sole responsibility of the partners of the "REHERIT 2.0" project and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.