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History of a disappearance : the story of a forgotten Polish town / Filip Springer ; translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye.

by Springer, Filip, 1982-

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Restless Books, 2017.

Miedzianka (Województwo Dolnośląskie, Poland) -- History.

Poland -- History -- Personal narratives.

9781632061157 (pbk.)

Miedzianka : historia znikania. English

318 pages : map ; 21 cm

"First published as 'Miedzianka : historia znikania' by Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2011"--Title page verso.

Translated from the Polish.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 314-318).

All the resurrections -- The bottle -- Kupferberger gold -- Daddy isn't there -- O Lord, make no tarrying -- They went away -- Photographs I -- Westward, or All the deaths of Barbara Wójcik -- Ueberschaer's tomb -- The second cemetery -- Long live Mikołajczyk! -- Postscript -- The last ones -- Don't touch the graves -- There was this fear -- The Germans are coming -- Whose fault -- That evil woman -- The church -- The manor house -- The brewery -- The letter -- Photographs II -- All Miedzianka's treasures -- The town is gone -- Epilogue.

Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. After Stalin's post-World War II redrawing of Poland's borders, Kupferberg became Miedzianka, a town settled by displaced people from all over Poland and a new center of the Eastern Bloc's uranium-mining industry. Decades of neglect and environmental degradation led to the town being declared uninhabitable, and the population was evacuated. Today, it exists only in ruins, with barely a hundred people living on the unstable ground above its collapsing mines. Springer catalogs the lost human elements: the long-departed tailor and deceased shopkeeper; the parties, now silenced, that used to fill the streets with shouts and laughter, and the once-beautiful cemetery, with gravestones upended by tractors and human bones scattered by dogs. In Miedzianka, Springer sees a microcosm of European history, and a powerful narrative of how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us in the present --Provided by the publisher

Bye, Sean Gasper.

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