History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town

History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town

History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town

History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town

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Overview

Winner of Asymptote Journal’s 2016 Close Approximations Translation Contest and Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Prize, History of a Disappearance is the fascinating true story of a small mining town in the southwest of Poland that, after seven centuries of history, disappeared.

Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and World War I. After Stalin’s post-World War II redrawing of Poland’s borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc’s uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared uninhabitable, and the population was evacuated. Today, it exists only in ruins, with barely a hundred people living on the unstable ground above its collapsing mines.

In this work of unsparing and insightful reportage, renowned journalist, photographer, and architecture critic Filip Springer rediscovers this small town’s fascinating history. Digging beyond the village’s mythic foundations and the great wars and world leaders that shaped it, Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter; and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781632061157
Publisher: Restless Books
Publication date: 04/04/2017
Pages: 320
Sales rank: 1,136,080
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Filip Springer (born 1982) is a self-taught journalist who has been working as a reporter and photographer since 2006. His journalistic debut—History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town—was shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Literary Reportage Prize in 2011 and was nominated for the Gdynia Literary Prize in 2012. He was also shortlisted for the Nike Literary Prize in 2012 and winner of the third annual Ryszard Kapuscinski fellows contest for young journalists.

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator of Polish, French, and Russian literature. He has translated work by some of Poland’s leading nonfiction writers, including Malgorzata Szejnert, Paweł Smolenski, and Lidia Ostalowska. An excerpt from his translation of History of a Disappearance won the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize in 2016. He lives in New York.

Table of Contents

All the Resurrections 11

The Bottle 31

Kupferberger Gold 34

Daddy Isn't There 63

O Lord, Make No Tarrying 68

They Went Away 105

Photographs I 108

Westward, or All the Deaths of Barbara Wójcik 112

Ueberschaer's Tomb 136

The Second Cemetery 143

Long Live Mikolajczyk! 150

Postscript 179

The Last Ones 184

Don't Touch the Graves 189

There Was This Fear 194

The Germans Are Coming 197

Whose Fault 231

That Evil Woman 238

The Church 260

The Manor House 267

The Brewery 271

The Letter 275

Photographs II 279

All Miedzianka's Treasures 284

The Town Is Gone 289

Epilogue 311

Selected Literature 314

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