Winner of Asymptote Journal's 2016 Close Approximations Translation
Contest and Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Prize, History of a
Disappearance is the fascinating true story of a small mining town in
the southwest of Poland that, after seven centuries of history,
disappeared.
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.
In this work of unsparing and insightful reportage, renowned journalist,
photographer, and architecture critic Filip Springer rediscovers this
small town's fascinating history. Digging beyond the village's mythic
foundations and the great wars and world leaders that shaped it,
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.
