than let them go alone to their deaths. The tour did not stop at the nearby Warsaw Rising Museum, which opened in 2004 to commemorate the citywide revolt against the Nazi occupation in 1944 that followed the Jewish ghetto uprising the year before. Instead, the bus went directly to the remnants of the ghetto walls, which are sandwiched between apartment buildings off a busy commercial stretch. We arrived at dusk, under a light drizzle, and found Israeli security outfitted with earpieces at the entrance. Seated in consecutive courtyards, groups of Israeli teenagers looked at photographs from the ghetto. Some were in tears; most were respectfully silent; all ignored the residents of the surrounding buildings as they came and went.

An exhibition under construction, featuring a reconstruction of the roofis a thousand years of unmitigated anti-Semitism.”

She showed a video introducing the museum and its galleries and then took questions: about how Poles have responded to her work, about whether any historic material had been found in the ghetto rubble beneath the museum site, and about the artists and typeface specialists she’d commissioned. Someone asked about the interest from the Polish public, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett replied, “I’m counting initially on the Bilbao effect”—a reference to Frank Gehry’s swooping architectural fantasia in northern Spain, which almost incidentally houses an outpost of the Guggenheim Museum. She went on to say that when she began traveling to Poland friends of hers encouraged her to visit the Wieliczka salt mines, in the country’s south, where miners carved underground cathedrals into the rock over