The Polish sculptor creating masterpieces inspired by places where terrified Jews hid during Holocaust

This artwork is shaped as a massive hand with a pointing finger, a kind of architectural protest at how formerly Jewish-owned properties are now used in contemporary Poland (on which more later).

When I meet Romik at St James’ Church Garden in London’s Piccadilly, it is at first difficult to imagine that this smiling blonde woman in a bright yellow dress is so deeply involved in Holocaust commemoration.

But it becomes less surprising when I learn she holds an MA in political studies from Warsaw University, a PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London and is also a postdoctoral fellow of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.

The Jewish scholar is also the 2022 Dan David Prize winner for her contribution to historical research.

Romik tells me that she was brought up in a secular Jewish home in Poland, where “Jewish life is different from Jewish life in Germany — there, there are more divisions between Progressive and Orthodox Jews.”

She is also keen to point out the creative bonds between artists and the Jewish community in contemporary Poland.

In addition to her Jewish hiding places project, Romik has created a “nomadic shtetl museum” filled with documents and artefacts from the places where Jews lived before the Second World War.

She drives her mobile museum to villages in Poland where Jews formerly lived and in many cases where their workshops have been taken over by Poles.

“It was a massive property transfer. I tell them, ‘Do you know you are living in an old Jewish house or working in a Jewish workshop?’”

Surprisingly, Romik says she has never encountered any antisemitism from the people she meets on her journeys. Instead, she says the communities she encounters are curious about uncovering the history of their village.

“When they know you are very serious about why you are there, that you know your history, they are open to learning,” she says.

Meanwhile, Romik is upset at the insensitive conversion of former Jewish buildings she sees across eastern Europe.

“When a former synagogue in Poland, Belarus or Ukraine is turned into a disco or a go-go club, it is very disturbing for Jews.”

To this end, she aims to breathe new life into the synagogues in different ways, via renovation projects that are often complex undertakings, not least because they often involve the cooperation of local government.

“They are difficult but they also bring me happiness and hope. It is good to work with architects and scholars who are trying to do the right thing by Jews.”

During her research into the history of one synagogue in Poland, she discovered its present-day inhabitants had no idea they were in a formerly Jewish building.

So she showed them documents and archive material shared by locals and explained the history of pogroms to them.

Romik’s “nomadic shtetl archive”, as she calls it, has already travelled to the site of ten former shtetls in north- east Poland.

It is a large vehicle with a reading room, and an exhibition area designed to resemble a synagogue and its walls are adorned with maps, posters and mirrors that “haunt the field of vision, a sort of disturbance of absence”.

“People are asked to imagine Jews who lived there before, to mirror their past and their experiences. The mirrors mean you see things from different angles and notice different things. They create an aura and a distance from the viewer.”

You could say she is something of an architectural conjurer. Romik always parks her mobile shtetl — created with the support of NGOs and various groups — in a market square surrounded by former Jewish houses and workshops.

“It’s always feels magical when I park up,” she says, although she also acknowledges that for non-Jewish Poles things can quickly become discomforting.

When she was setting the project up, many approached her with many stories about wartime hideouts.

“There are thousands of testimonies of people hiding and we have scholars writing about them. We also know that many have been destroyed or are languishing in unknown attics.

“People” she adds, “are moved by the high artistic quality of the nomadic shtetl and the people I work with now have considerable knowledge of Jewish affairs.

“They clean Jewish cemeteries, they record Jewish history.” And although that history often causes discomfort, she never sugar-coats it for her readers and listeners.

“Poles carried out pogroms and we need to talk about this. When I travelled with the archive and the Jad, I never shy from discussing antisemitism. We all need to talk about our dark moments”.

Her research is ongoing and she now works closely with Polin, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is based on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto.

Thanks to the museum’s reach, many Jews’ hiding places have been revealed. Places such as the cellar of a house in Ukraine where Klara Kramer with her family and two others hid from 1942 to 1944.

“They built the hiding place with very primitive tools and in secret.”

Romik has also made casts of a grave where some written testimony has been discovered, of a tree inside which people hid, of a section of a sewage system and of a cellar door in a 15th-century house in Lviv.

One family found a cupboard in a Polish village that contained strange drawings of sexual scenes and fairy tales with a note saying: “This was my hiding place.” The cupboard is now held in Polin.

The Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland helped her locate graves in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery in which coins, matzah boxes and details of how graves were extended to accommodate living people were discovered.

She plans to document all the finds in a forthcoming book. And she is also planning an exhibition on the 1,000-year history of the Jews in Krakow.

Next February her hiding places exhibition opens in the Frankfurt Jewish Museum.

“Right now, the Polish government is talking a lot at the moment about the Righteous Among the Nations, and they were, it goes without saying, incredibly brave human beings who we should remember.

“But Polish-Jewish history is also populated by pogroms, by dark shadows. We need to talk about those events too.

“And it is my duty to do the talking.”