Every War Ends Eventually: Three Exhibitions at Warsaw’s History Meeting House

warszawa_na_nowo_dsh_6-s.jpg, default, Feast of the Rebirth of Poland, a folk celebration on the pavement and on the square of the Jasiński tenement house, demolished during the war, at the

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From photos from Ukrainian bomb shelters, through Warsaw just after the war, to contemporary streets. The autumn-winter season at the Warsaw History Meeting House is a story about memory and how history always touches the individual.

The first of three autumn exhibitions proves that the name of the Warsaw History Meeting House is not exact. There is no history in the photos – only the present. Non-Collateral Damage consists of twenty photographs provided by Magnum Photos agency that evocatively depict the tragedy of war in Ukraine. We won't see the frontline in them. There's no blood in any of the shots, except one in which – as a show of support for the Ukrainian Azov Brigade (or perhaps simply an expression of desperation?) – a beautiful young woman's forehead looks as if she's carved the unit's name into it with something sharp. We don't see burning buildings – but the silence between air raids. In some photographs – for example, Sabiha Çimen's, which opens the exhibition and depicts a floor strewn with scattered women's shoes – what strikes most is absence.

One of the most moving photographs is a scene captured by Moises Saman in the Kharkiv metro. During Russian shelling, the underground metro has been transformed into a camp. The floor is strewn with sleeping bags and blankets, with knotted shopping bags, plastic cups, and water bottles lying everywhere. A girl – bent over, we don't see her face – is charging her phone. In the farthest part of the frame, a young man simply lies on his side, his hand under his cheek. Paradoxically, the only dynamic element is a large-format Scotch & Soda advertisement: an echo of pre-war normality. Sliding into a light-colored sleeping bag, the woman stares straight ahead. Her tired, empty, hopeless gaze meets mine. I find it hard to look away first. This isn’t our war, right? our war? And is it hers?

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'Non-Collateral Damage' exhibition, History Meeting House, photo: Anastasiya Kanarska, IAM

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The next three photos are by Paolo Pellegrin, a Roman photojournalist, long-time member of the Magnum agency, and winner of 11 World Press Photo awards.

The first photograph shows an elderly couple in Konstantynivka (Donetsk Oblast) selling off their belongings: on tablecloths or cardboard are jugs, containers, a box, perhaps containing puzzles? Nothing of value. Although this probably doesn't matter anyway: besides these two frozen figures, there's no other person in the photo.

The second photograph is saturated with emotion. A woman and a man lean towards each other. She holds his head, and he reaches for her other hand. A lyrical, quiet scene – one that could only evoke tender emotion if not for the caption, which states that the man is a soldier and that the couple is in a secret location in the Kharkiv Oblast.

Finally, the third photograph by Pellegrin – a kneeling woman in a black outfit, throwing flowers onto the road. This is a custom that has been present in many villages and towns in Ukraine since the beginning of the war: when a funeral procession with a fallen soldier arrives in their hometown, the residents greet them in this very way.

The exhibition's title refers to the term 'collateral damage,' which dates back to the Cold War era and refers to civilian losses (referring to both material objects and people) accidentally caused by warfare in international law. The exhibition's curators argue that the destroyed cities, traumatized children, and the poverty that befalls residents are not 'collateral damage”. Co-curator Irene Lombardo of Magnum Photos emphasizes that the photographs documenting everyday life 'refute the notion that the fate of civilians is a sideline. They show us that what is often described as collateral lies at the heart of a subject we must never forget.'

The exhibition also features photographs by Polish photojournalist Rafał Milach. He is the author of those shocking portraits of young women who demonstrated their support for the Azovites with their own faces. However, another of his photographs is most impressive: a colorful corner in a shelter, a plastic donkey, a red foam mat, and a rope ladder. A place where children can play during air raids. I'm glad they're not in the photo – and that I don't have to look at them right now.

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Children, however, appear in the last three photographs of Non-Collateral… – older ones and not from Ukraine, but from the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In one of the shots by Abbas, an Iranian-French photographer, a young boy runs across the Latin Bridge – then called the Bridge of Death in Sarajevo because of the shelling. The caption under the photo states that the boy is so small that he doesn't have to bend down like adults – he's invisible behind the containers that protect passersby from Serbian snipers' bullets.

Another shot: a group of laughing children slides down the middle of the street on sleds. At any moment, Serbian mortar shells could rain down on the road, but the photo shows no fear: for now, the only thing that has fallen is snow – and that's the most important thing right now.

Together with Abbas' fourth painting, from 1999, depicting a market in ruins in the Kosovo town of Peć, the photos from the 1990s form a bridge between Non-Collateral… and the second exhibition currently underway at HMH: Warsaw Reborn which presents reportage photographs from 1945–1949 from the archives of the Polish Press Agency. Both exhibitions – the wartime Ukrainian-Bosnian-Kosovan one and the post-war Warsaw one – clash on the one hand, but on the other, they intertwine; one flows seamlessly into the other.

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'Non-Collateral Damage' exhibition, History Meeting House, photo: Maks Januszewicz / HMH

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Rebuilding from the Ruins

Seeing Warsaw Reborn, we regain hope – although the ruins are visible in almost every frame, this is a surprisingly optimistic exhibition. These dozens of photographs document the spectrum of post-war life: from children playing in the rubble, through an open-air mass, to the 'pass the brick' action, in which young people lined up together to raise their city back up from the ruins. A woman hanging laundry. Sheets fluttering on clotheslines among the ruins.

Many of the shots transcend the documentary's framework, their aesthetic dimension coming to the fore. The famous photo of a family at a table, with a tablecloth and flowers, standing on the edge of a room without walls.

Or another: elegant women in knee-length coats and high heels – if you squinted, you could even pretend for a moment that the ruins in the background were the Colosseum, and the empty space the women were traversing was a Roman piazza.

And finally: a surprising number of shots of children. Moving – like this photo of barefoot few-year-olds playing for a living in the street. Touching – like the portrait of a girl sitting in the rubble with a doll on her lap. Heartwarming – like these four little ones, one of whom, in a world-famous gesture, put a finger in her mouth, the other up her nose. And chilling, like this photograph of a boy with a toy rifle.

It's hard to suspect postwar photojournalists like Jerzy Baranowski or Stanisław Dąbrowiecki of sentimentality. So it can't just be about the fact that young children make graceful models, or that their innocence contrasts so starkly with the postwar setting. Rather, it's an anti-war manifesto.

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Polonia Restituta, folk celebration on the sidewalk and square of the Jasiński tenement house, demolished during the war, at the intersection of 3 Maja Avenue (now Jerozolimskie Avenue) and Nowy Świat Street. Warsaw, July 22, 1947, photo: Stanisław Dąbrowiecki / PAP / DSH press materials

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Moving on, I come to a photograph of a couple in love. A scene very similar to the one in Non-Collateral… In this photograph, she also embraces him, and he tilts his head towards her, only here we also have a baby carriage and the sky overhead. The young parents are sitting by the Vistula River. A similar scene, but with a strikingly different meaning. Staff's fervent assurances from his first post-war volume come to mind: 'We will live in our own house, / We will tread our own steps. […] You see: we live, though death is close.' This isn't the only moment where it's clear that the juxtaposition of Intentional Losses and Warsaw allows for a more comprehensive reading of both exhibitions.

'I see in these photos the victory of life, a reminder that every war eventually ends,' says HMH director Katarzyna Puchalska, whom I asked to tell me not only about the current exhibitions but also about the institution she directs.

The Warsaw section is, to a certain extent, a commemorative exhibition, created as part of the capital's celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of Warsaw's reconstruction. Puchalska explains, however, that she didn't want to leave it without a contemporary context, but rather to allude to the war in Ukraine.

'When I was planning this exhibition, I hoped the war in Ukraine would be over. It quickly became clear that it wouldn't be, and the attitude of Polish society towards the war raging right next door began to change radically.' In the meantime, together with the Press Club, we opened Ewa Meissner's outdoor exhibition, The Eyes of War, which featured photographs by fourteen Polish and Ukrainian photojournalists. Among the Polish were Marek Berezowski, Agata Grzybowska, Wojtek Grzędziński, and Tomasz Lazar. Taking this into account, as well as the 'weariness' with war, I decided to explore this contemporary context with the Magnum Photos agency. Together with Beata Łyżwa-Sokół [co-curator of the Non-Collateral Damage exhibition – SN], we selected non-literal images of war. We also added several of Abbas's photos from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia to emphasize that the war in Europe did not end in 1945,' she explains. And adds:

They say that historia magistra vitae est, but that's not true. We keep making the same mistakes and drawing no conclusions.' We celebrated the end of World War II with great pomp; war wasn't supposed to return, especially after the fall of communism. However, that didn't happen. I have the impression that today no one remembers not only that cruel war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but also the one currently raging just beyond our borders. Or maybe we don't forget about it, but we think about it much less. Because it 'tires' us. Even though it’s not us who go into bomb shelters at night.

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Ghetto ruins. The woman in the foreground is probably standing on the ruins of a tenement building at 34 Świętojerska Street. Warsaw, June 1948, photo: Stanisław Dąbrowiecki / PAP / HMH press materials

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History Happening Today

The first exhibition Puchalska produced when she began working at HMH a dozen years ago was a photographic essay about Warsaw in 1948, based on photographs from the Polish Press Agency archives. In 2024, an exhibition of Zbyszek Siemaszko's photojournalistic photographs was a huge hit. In 2022, it was Chris Niedenthal. In 2020, it was photo essays from the magazine itd. It's clear that this method of storytelling has special significance here.

'Over the past period of our activity, we have specialized in presenting unknown, often newly discovered photographic collections. For several years now, we have also begun organizing comprehensive exhibitions by photographers such as Tadeusz Rolke, Chris Niedenthal, and Wojciech Plewiński. The high level of content and production of our projects has made HMH currently considered one of the best galleries in Warsaw,' says Puchalska. Documentary and reportage photography captures a moment in time. For me, it's a wonderful historical source. You look at a photo from years ago and see those houses, streets, cars, people, their clothes, hairstyles, and relationships. At HMH, history has always been told through people's fates; social history and individual perspectives have been crucial. Important political events have merely been a backdrop. This is absolutely consistent with my thinking about history and its popularization. My first professional assignment, back at the Karta Center, was working with Jacek Kuroń's archive. I've always been most fascinated by his sensitivity and focus on the fate of ordinary people.

The mention of Kuroń causes our conversation to briefly shift to Krakow, to the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, whose hip-hop performance, co-produced with the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, 1989, about the Solidarity movement, sparked a sudden interest in Poland's modern history among young people.

'I am full of admiration for the creators of the piece, who managed to show the human side of those changes. I observe that, unfortunately, the very word 'history' is often off-putting; that it conjures up associations, especially among young people, of dust and slippers. Yet we desperately need it. Professor Barbara Skarga once said that philosophy is not a science, but a kind of knowledge without which humanity cannot do. This idea seems very apt to me in relation to history as well,' says the head of the HMH.

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The Warsaw History Meeting House has no equivalents in Poland, but in France and Germany – it does. Moreover, it is the French word maisons that gives rise to the name of the institution, which is neither a museum, gallery, theater, bookstore, or café – yet is a bit of all of these. Katarzyna Puchalska, however, distances herself from the term 'cultural center,' because, as she explains, such centers deal with culture in the broadest sense and also offer a regular program of classes and workshops. Meanwhile, the HMH through a variety of activities, including artistic ones, popularizes contemporary history. Although the Warsaw institution is largely associated with photography exhibitions, it also hosts performances, discussions, publications, produces documentaries, and even offers postgraduate studies in historical documentary film. The HMH also publishes the Dwutygodnik magazine, and its Oral History Archive (run jointly with Karta Center, who was the first to collect accounts of people deported to the East during WWII) houses Poland’s largest collection of biographical accounts.

'It's an invaluable source. Accounts are often subjective, based on impressions. They tell how a given event is remembered, not always precisely. It's good to compare them with other sources, but I really like Loesje’s slogan, that each of us creates history, and that's why I value this part of the HMH’s work so much,' my interviewee explains.

Currently, the Oral History Archive team is working to create a network with other institutions that have similar collections. According to Puchalska, the lack of interinstitutional cooperation is one of the problems of Polish culture. The HMH is countering this by increasingly joining forces with institutions in Poland and abroad. She is also pleased with the recent collaboration with the prestigious agency Magnum Photos, which provided the photos featured in the latest exhibition.

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Curators of the exhibition 'Non-Collateral Damage' from left: HMH director Katarzyna Puchalska, Irene Lombardo, Beata Łyżwa-Sokół, photo: Anna Hernik / HMH

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Photojournalism

Non-Collateral Damage tells not only about war, but also about the role of war photography and the work of a photojournalist. When smartphones appeared, the end of this profession was predicted; everyone was to be a documentalist. Photo sections in newspapers were reduced, eventually disappearing almost completely. Photojournalists were supposed to be redundant; photos were to be obtained from people at the scene.

'In February 2022, a full-scale war broke out in Ukraine,' says Puchalska. 'Media from around the world are now regularly sending their correspondents there because suddenly there's a renewed awareness that it's not just the photo itself that matters, but also who took it. Editors must ensure that the shots are not manipulated.' In the introduction to the book published to coincide with the exhibition opening, the curators of Non-Collateral… write:

In our times, history can easily be rewritten and illustrated with images using artificial intelligence tools. Photojournalism, collecting testimonies, and publishing verified information and facts seem more important than ever. They provide a counterweight to political propaganda and fake news.

'Why am I so insistent on photojournalism being present in our institution? And why do photojournalists still travel to dangerous places, document news, and also pursue longer stories? For me, this type of photography is even more important now than before, because it's really easy to fake an image these days,' Puchalska explains. 'That's why the signature of the photographer is so important today, as is the legitimation from a respected agency like Magnum. Collaborating with Magnum Photos has long been a dream of mine, and I wasn't interested in just a one-off partnership.' Work is already underway on the next joint project between HMH and Magnum, which will premiere in Warsaw in the spring of 2026. We hope this is just the beginning of our long-term collaboration.

The Warsaw-based institution is increasingly presenting itself abroad. I spoke with the HMH director the day after she returned from the opening of Romuald Broniarek's exhibition at the Photo Wien festival. Previously, for six months, from the fall of 2024 to March 2025, his photographs could be seen on the same walls where Warsaw Reborn hangs now.

The Viennese festival is curated by the artistic director of the new centre for contemporary photography and media, Foto Arsenal Wien. And we're entering this project with photographs by a completely forgotten Polish photographer; if remembered at all, it's only for his propaganda work. Meanwhile, Broniarek also took occasional photojournalistic photographs throughout his life, which, I guarantee, are on par with the caliber of great Western photographers. And he took them with inferior equipment and on much lower-quality materials than his Western colleagues. We have many more such photographers in Poland.

Restoring the memory of former photojournalists is part of the HMH's mission. The exhibition Warsaw Reborn, in a slightly different format, took place already a few years ago, but almost no one saw it then: the opening took place just before the lockdown was announced. It has returned, updated, to the extent possible, with the names and biographies of the photographers.

Women Role Models

If we begin the tour clockwise, starting with Non-Collateral Damage, and then proceeding through Warsaw Reborn, we will finally arrive at a small but high space displaying Maryna Tomaszewska's work, WAW. Women’s City, Women’s Streets.

This is the final part of the autumn triptych, and like Non-Collateral... it harmonizes perfectly with Warsaw Reborn. 'We have rebuilt the capital, but what kind?' Tomaszewska asks about the contemporary world. It turns out, it's one in which, for example, we have a thoroughfare named after two pilots – Żwirko and Wigura, leading from the city center to Chopin Airport, and at the same time, a street named after three Polish Female Pilots [Pol. Trzech Lotniczek Polskich]– that one already without surnames.

One wall is occupied by a work consisting of over four hundred surnames of women, which could be used to name Warsaw streets, and which can also be heard read by a female voice. On the opposite wall hangs a patchwork map of the city – the artist used black and red strips of fabric, ribbons, and football fan scarves. The installation is complemented by a third element: screen-printed works, such as a plaque with the name of a street commemorating the previously mentioned anonymous female pilots.

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Maryna Tomaszewska's exhibition, 'WAW. Women’s City, Women’s Streets', History Meeting House, Warsaw, photo: Maks Januszewicz / HMH

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Feminist themes have been prominent in the HMH's activities for many years. Last year, the first Heroine Festival, dedicated to women's history, took place here. On Sunday, October 26, 2025, the second edition, titled Women Role Models, concluded – Maryna Tomaszewska's exhibition was created as part of this event.

At Puchalska's initiative, the main event of last year's first Festival was the premiere of Agnieszka Przepiórska's acclaimed monodrama, The Survivors written by Piotr Rowicki, directed by Maja Kleczewska, and produced by HMH. The play reveals a previously unknown, horrific chapter in Polish history: it tells the story of the women from Zieleniak, raped and murdered in August 1944 by Russian People’s Liberation Army bandits.

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'The Survivors' directed by Maja Kleczewska, photo: Magdalena Hueckel / DSH

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'This is a difficult, very painful performance, but what's important to me is that thanks to The Survivors, we're talking about those women and girls, about their hurt, loneliness, and, unfortunately, about what still happens during wars,' says the HMH director.

Przepiórska's earlier biographical monodrama, You don’t die in May (written by Piotr Rowicki, directed by Anna Gryszkówna), was also produced by HMH. For her role as Barbara Sadowska, an opposition activist and poet, the mother of Grzegorz Przemyk, who was tortured to death by Communist Militia officers, the actress received the annual acting award from the monthly Teatr magazine. In turn, for her monodrama The Survivors among other things, Agnieszka Przepiórska was honored with the Annual Award of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage 2025 in the theater category.

'I once heard the comment about HMH's work that “we only deal with women”. Just then, we were opening an exhibition about the women of Solidarity. I believe men can't be erased from history, yet women have been erased, and our task is to restore them to the public consciousness. All you have to do is look at journalistic albums published a dozen or so years ago to see that the photos are almost exclusively men. And even if a woman appears in a photograph, she's the only one not included in the caption,' says Puchalska.

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From HMH, I step straight into the 19th century: the filming for The Doll is taking place on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street. A horse-drawn carriage drives along the sand-covered street, now softened by rain and muddy, past a wooden mock-up of Wokulski's shop. Passersby glance at the sign written in Cyrillic. It's like something out of a history textbook, completely different from the ones I've been looking at for the past two hours. The one from The Doll feeds us with a pleasant nostalgia for the old days, for what has been and will never return. The other ones, on the other hand, remind us that history is still unfolding – right before our eyes.

Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar

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