smoked as we talked and lamented the calculated destruction of Warsaw during the citywide uprising in 1944, a year after the battle of the Jewish ghetto. He pointed at buildings outside the window that looked like they had been built in the late 19th century but that were in fact a century younger; even the façade of the Opera building in which we sat had had only been finished in 2002. An alcove outside his door contained the sole remnant that survived in the rubble of the prewar opera house: a small statue of a forgotten actor named Alojzy Zolkowski, which was missing its face. “Nothing is real, because Hitler commissioned the only plan in mankind not to build a city but to destroy a city,” Dabrowski said.remaining Jews from the country in 1968—an event that at the time, Gebert said, was seen by some Poles as another kind of Jewish privilege, since most Poles were prohibited from emigrating at all. Even the history of the Solidarity movement, in which Jews were deeply involved, is fraught. “The fact that Jews were also overrepresented in Solidarity makes it worse,” Gebert, himself a former Solidarity activist, told me with a rueful grin, “because then you activate the ‘cling to power’ trope.”

Gebert looks forward to the opening of the museum—in part because of how often the project, initially scheduled to open in 2010, has been delayed, first because of problems facing the contractor hired by the Polish government and then because of funding shortfalls for the core exhibit,