The building work is nearing an end at the Melody Lofts, a three-storey redbrick factory that has gained two additional floors and is now flanked by two modern neighbouring buildings. Hoardings outside promise stylish new homes for people who value” space, style and history”.
We are in the city of Lodz in central Poland, where, a century ago, this was the buzzing textile and stocking factory owned by the Rozenfeld family.
They were one of countless Jewish families that helped make Lodz, 120km southwest of Warsaw, into Poland’s third-largest city and an industrial powerhouse to rival Manchester.
The Rozenfelds are long gone: those not murdered by the Nazis were scared away by anti-Jewish feeling in postwar Poland. Monika Rozenfeld was born here in 1939 and – thanks to her mother Kryszia’s luck, bravery and ingenuity – survived the Holocaust in the Warsaw Ghetto. Mother and daughter lost most of their family and started again in London.
RM Block
In 1990, after the Iron Curtain fell, Monika travelled back to Lodz to see what was left of the family inheritance with her son Oliver.
Some 35 years later Sears – now a Dublin-based gallerist – has returned with a new iteration of his exhibition, Objects of Love.
Three years ago in Dublin Castle, the exhibition broke visitor records by telling his family’s tragedy and triumph through personal objects such as rings, a monogrammed powder compact and photos of people murdered by Nazi Germany.
“What makes it so painful is that there are no bodies and funerals,” says Sears. “But when 35,000 people came to see it in Dublin, when I saw those people queuing up to see an exhibition of my family’s story shuffling past photographs of my family, they were paying their respects to them.”
Respect is on Sears’s mind as we sit in Lodz, where his dogged research has seen other missing pieces of his family puzzle fall into place. Last January, during one of his occasional online genealogical searches, Sears came across the name of his maternal grandfather, Pawel Rozenfeld, listed on the website of the Radogoszcz memorial, a notorious former Gestapo prison on the outskirts of Lodz.
Sears contacted the memorial museum, introduced himself and his family, and told them about his Dublin exhibition, co-created with his wife, Catherine Punch.
“Within 48 hours they came back and said they would love to do it there,” says Sears. A “really happy dialogue” followed over the subsequent six months and the Rozenfeld family history is now an outdoor exhibition here.
Family heirlooms are on display in a glass case inside the adjacent former prison. It was here that Pawel Rozenfeld and two employees of his stocking factory were brought in 1939, weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland that triggered the second World War.
In the subsequent six years, about 40,000 people passed through this detention centre – Jews, political prisoners and others – before its horrific end. In May 1945 the retreating Germans set fire to the prison. At least 1,000 prisoners died in the blaze and just 30 survived in a water tank.
Pawel Rozenfeld was long dead at this stage, having been taken from the prison after 11 days and most likely shot in a local forest. Recent excavations of mass graves there give hope that Sears, who has provided DNA samples, may finally find his grandfather.
For now the Lodz exhibition has filled in other small but humanising gaps in his family’s history, such as their old telephone number discovered in a contemporary phone book. Although his elderly mother, Monika, was unable to attend the opening, Sears saw his task in Lodz as restoring the identity and dignity of a father she lost here as an infant.
“I want to honour him by bringing him alive here again,” says Sears.
Few walking around this city today realise just how much of its staggering industrial architecture the city owes to its missing Jewish citizens such as Pawel Rozenfeld or his father, Mozes, who founded the stocking factory that employed 140 people.
Poland’s pre-war Jewish population was about 3.2 million, about 10 per cent of the total, but in Lodz the Jewish population was closer to 40 per cent.
Irish ambassador to Poland Patrick Haughey, in his opening address, recalled how the barbarity of the Holocaust had yielded to an international order once again under attack by a “growth in populism, the temptation to curb human rights and restrict freedom of the media”.
“I hope this exhibition will continue to reach new generations, to encourage them to understand the horrors of the past and heed the warnings,” he said.
Local curator Ludvika Majewska praised Sears for his labour of love in cherishing – and sharing – the remaining Rozenfeld family heirlooms.
“Love is still present in these objects from those heartbreaking times,” she said. “Even in times of brutality and loss, love is the feeling which allows us to survive.”
At a dinner following the opening, members of Lodz’s ageing Jewish community reflected on the many ghosts of the Rozenfelds and others.
“Jewish life was pretty much buried here after the war and it’s not possible now to rebuild,” said local Jewish man Henryk Brand.
“Young people can’t have a Jewish life here any more, there is no infrastructure,” adds Dorota Ciesieska, whose daughters now live in Israel and the UK.
Other young Jewish families who stayed in Poland have moved to the nearby Polish capital. The morning after the exhibition opening in Warsaw, Poland’s Brooklyn-born chief rabbi Michael Schudrich studies with interest the Objects of Love catalogue.
For three decades, Schudrich’s efforts to re-establish Jewish life in Poland have seen him straddle the fault lines of a country with two discrete, yet interlinked, Nazi-era tragedies: the murder of 2.5 million ethnic Poles and of 2.8 million Jews. Poland’s previous national conservative government was particularly energetic in focusing on ethnic Poles’ wartime suffering, bravery and martyrs – for which there are ample examples – as part of a nationalist narrative push.
This approach was welcomed by some, correcting what they saw as too much focus on Jewish victims of the Nazis. Others in Poland were – and remain – concerned that the resulting museums, schoolbooks and legislation hinder educators and historians. Rabbi Schudrich says fears of a crackdown on critical historical research are overblown, but he understands concerns of a chilling effect – and its consequences.
“One of the biggest fears is that young scholars might think twice about going into Jewish history as a subject because they could get themselves into some kind of mess,” he says. “And who wants to have that headache?”
With the current liberal-left government of Donald Tusk, he says things are “more calm”. But like many, Schudrich is watching with interest to see how Karol Nawrocki, Poland’s new nationalist-aligned historian-turned-president, will shape this emotional debate over competing strands of victimhood that go to the heart of modern Polish identity.
Back in Lodz, Oliver Sears is in a reflective mood about his family and the luxury apartments being built in their former factory. Postwar Polish laws ruled out compensation for this commercial property, but Sears hopes the exhibition will aid his campaign for memorial plaques here. “We are looking for a monument that endures, remembering their memory and the injustice they suffered,” he says. “What we will not accept, is their erasure.”
