Piotr Piwowarczyk: My grandfather’s story turned out to be the story of my entire family. Eventually, I realised it was also the story of my city.
Is it possible to confront a person’s past without seeking to justify it? In his documentary 'Amnesia', Piotr Piwowarczyk returns to one of the darkest chapters of post-war Polish history – the Kielce pogrom. Yet the film is neither an attempt to reconstruct the events of 4 July 1946 nor to offer definitive answers. Instead, it begins with a deeply personal point of departure: the filmmaker's own grandfather, involved in the violence. From there, ‘Amnesia’ evolves into a meditation on the enduring legacy of violence, the weight of silence, and the memories that remain unspoken yet continue to shape successive generations. What begins as a conversation about a film gradually opens onto broader questions of responsibility, inherited trauma, and the courage to keep asking difficult questions – even when certainty remains beyond reach.
This interview was recorded during a discussion following the screening of ‘Amnesia’, organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity. The conversation was moderated by Urszula Bijoś and Prof. Ewelina Szpak. The text has been edited for publication on the basis of the recorded discussion.
Work on ‘Amnesia’ began as a deeply personal investigation. Before it reached audiences, the film was an attempt to come to terms with the history of your own family. So who was ‘Amnesia’ ultimately made for?
In truth, I made this film first and foremost for myself. I needed to confront my family’s past and understand the mechanisms of denial that had shaped it for decades. At first, I thought I was telling a family story. Gradually, however, I came to realise that the very same mechanisms extended far beyond my own family – to the city itself, and even to the realm of collective memory. What increasingly compelled me was not only what had happened, but also why it had remained unspoken for so many years.
It was a deeply personal investigation. I wanted to understand how, barely a year after the war – after the Holocaust and a catastrophe beyond comprehension – ordinary people could turn against their own neighbours. I was not looking for sensational revelations or previously unknown historical facts. I was trying to answer a question that had become deeply personal: how could something like this happen in the very place I come from.
I never found a definitive answer. Historians, after all, continue to debate the causes of the Kielce pogrom to this day. But over time, I realised that I had become less interested in resolving a historical controversy and more interested in understanding the individual. I wanted to understand my grandfather – not in order to excuse him, but to confront a far more unsettling question: how does an ordinary person become a participant in violence.
In the film, you emphasise that your grandfather was neither a politician nor an ideologue. Why was that distinction so important to you?
Because it is all too easy to shift responsibility onto the grand narratives of history. Of course, the state shapes historical policy, constructs particular narratives, highlights certain facts while consigning others to silence. All of this matters. But my grandfather was neither an official of the regime nor a political activist. He was a locksmith at the Ludwików factory. He survived the occupation, wanted to rebuild his life, and was one of thousands of ordinary residents of Kielce.
That is precisely why his story became so important to me. I was not trying to understand the decisions of political leaders or the workings of the state apparatus. I wanted to understand an ordinary man who, one day, found himself in a crowd taking part in an act of violence.
I sometimes feel that discussions about provocation – regardless of who is believed to have orchestrated it – can become a way of shifting responsibility away from the people who actually took part. Yet those on the streets of Kielce that day were, above all, the city’s own residents. They were the ones making choices. And that was the reality I ultimately had to confront.
Yet the search for answers about your grandfather soon becomes a story about your entire family.
That's true. And I don't think I realised that at the beginning. My grandfather's story was the starting point, but it quickly became clear that what mattered most were its consequences. After the pogrom, my grandfather was arrested. While he was in prison, my mother was born. That became a defining moment for our entire family.
I will never know what truly happened to him during that time. I don't know to what extent he was changed by a sense of guilt, and to what extent by imprisonment and the interrogations he endured. What I do know is that he returned a different man. A few years later, he died before reaching the age of fifty, leaving behind a family marked by a trauma that remained unnamed for many years.
It was only while making the film that I realised my grandfather's story did not end on 4 July 1946. In many ways, that was when it began to shape the lives of the generations that followed. In that sense, ‘Amnesia’ is a story about what we inherit – not only memory, but silence as well.
Making the film must also have meant confronting your own family history. How do you draw the line between documentary and privacy?
That was the greatest challenge of the entire project. From the outset, Jerzy Śladkowski and I knew we did not want to make a conventional historical documentary. We were not interested in reconstructing events or settling historical debates. What we wanted to explore was the point where history meets memory – where public history encounters the most intimate, deeply personal memory.
The hardest part was finding the line between what could be shared and what ought to remain within the family. In documentary filmmaking, that line is a delicate one – especially when the story is your own. It was important to me not to stage anything or force anything to happen. I simply wanted to create a space where what had remained unspoken for so many years could finally be given a voice.
One of the most moving scenes in ‘Amnesia’ is the conversation with your mother. It feels like the moment when history ceases to be simply a story about the past.
Yes, I think that was the most difficult moment of the entire filmmaking process. It was the first time my mother chose to speak on camera about her childhood, about our family’s life after her father's arrest, and about experiences that had remained confined to family memory for decades. We had never spoken about these things in that way before.
It was an incredibly moving experience, but also an emotionally overwhelming one. Suddenly, I realised that in trying to understand my grandfather's story, I had arrived at my mother’s. And that it was she who had carried the consequences of those events throughout her life, despite having had no part in them.
Much more was said during the filming than ultimately found its way into ‘Amnesia’. We made a conscious decision to leave out the most intimate parts of that conversation. We never wanted to create emotion at the expense of someone else's suffering or cross the boundaries of privacy. Sometimes, what remains unspoken speaks more powerfully than the most dramatic confession ever could.
Your aunt does not appear in the film, even though, as you have mentioned, she remembered those events much more clearly.
We spoke many times, but always off camera. After my conversation with my mother, I went back to my aunt and told her I had learned things I had never known before. I also told her that her perspective could be invaluable, because she was older and remembered so much more.
She replied very calmly, but with great firmness: “These are family matters. We are not going to bring them into the public eye.” I respected her decision.
Of course, as a filmmaker, I was disappointed, because her story could have added so much. But as her grandson, I understood completely. Not everyone has an obligation to speak publicly about their own trauma. Some people feel the need to tell their story. Others choose silence. And I believe both responses deserve equal respect. That experience also made me realise something important. Memory is not defined solely by what is spoken. It is revealed just as much through what people choose not to say – or simply cannot put into words.
I have the impression that ‘Amnesia’ is, above all, a film about silence.
I think that is a very perceptive reading. At first, I believed I was trying to understand a single historical event. But the longer I worked on the film, the more clearly I saw that what happened afterwards was just as important. The conversations that never took place. The things that were pushed aside. The way certain experiences are passed from one generation to the next, even when no one ever gives them a name.
I came to understand that trauma is not always passed down through stories. Sometimes it is transmitted through silence instead – through unspoken tensions, unfinished sentences, words left hanging in the air. Children grow up in that atmosphere, and even if they do not know the facts, they quickly learn that there are questions better left unasked.
I think that is precisely why ‘Amnesia’ does not end with an answer. It ends with a question. I never wanted to pretend that I had unravelled every mystery surrounding the Kielce pogrom. That would have been dishonest. What interested me instead was showing that memory is never something fixed or complete. It is an ongoing process—one that continually calls for conversation.
Is that why you say that memory is not an archive, but a process?
Yes, because memory does not work like an archive that we can simply return to years later and arrange into a coherent whole. It is shaped not only by facts, but also by emotions, silences, family rituals, and fragments of remembrance. Very often, it is only many years later that we begin to understand the significance of things that seemed entirely insignificant when we were children.
Working on ‘Amnesia’ also led me to another realisation. The more I learned, the more clearly I saw how much would never be known. Witnesses pass away, memory fades, and documents cannot answer every question. Paradoxically, that was the moment when I stopped thinking of the film as an attempt to solve a mystery. Instead, I came to see it as an invitation to a conversation. Because perhaps what matters most is not having all the answers, but never giving up on asking questions.
‘Amnesia’ has been screened not only in Poland, but also abroad – including in the United States, Mexico, and within Jewish communities. Did the way audiences responded to the film change you in any way?
Every one of those encounters was different. Yet they all made me realise that ‘Amnesia’ had ceased to be merely my own personal story. People rarely asked about my grandfather or the details of the pogrom. Much more often, our conversations turned to memory, responsibility, and how we live with difficult histories inherited from previous generations.
Abroad, Kielce is almost invariably associated with the pogrom. I have experienced that countless times myself. But I never set out to change that perception or persuade anyone that history had unfolded differently. What mattered to me was something else: to show that present-day Kielce is not indifferent to this past. There are people who have spent years working to restore the memory of the victims and foster dialogue. For me, Bogdan Białek has come to embody that commitment. Thanks to people like him, history does not remain merely a burden – it can also become the starting point for a responsible conversation.
You once said that even a tragedy of this magnitude can be “turned into something good.” That is a bold statement.
I understand why it might sound provocative, which is why I always feel the need to explain what I mean. I do not believe that tragedy is, in itself, a source of value. What matters is what we choose to do with its memory.
Every community has moments in its history of which it cannot be proud. We can deny them and pretend they never happened. Or we can treat them as an opportunity for deeper reflection about ourselves. I hope that this is, little by little, what is happening in Kielce. We cannot change the past, but we can change the way we talk about it. And if ‘Amnesia’ contributes, even in some small way, to that conversation, then I believe the film has fulfilled its purpose.
Do you see the film differently now, years after its premiere?
Certainly with greater peace of mind. When I began working on it, I believed I would find answers. Today, I know that some questions simply cannot be resolved once and for all. History rarely grants us the comfort of certainty.
Paradoxically, I no longer see that as a failure. Quite the opposite. I have come to understand that not everything needs to be explained in order to have meaning. Sometimes, what matters most is simply the willingness to seek understanding.
‘Amnesia’ captured a very particular moment in my life – a moment when, for the first time, I found the courage to ask questions about my own family. Today, I see the film less as the end of a journey than as its beginning.
What has that journey taught you?
Above all, humility. When I first began this journey, I believed history was something that could simply be uncovered. That if you found the right documents and spoke to the right people, everything would eventually become clear. It turned out to be far more complex than that. There are facts that can be established. There are testimonies that can be recovered. But there is also human experience—something that can never be fully reconstructed.
That is perhaps the most important lesson I took away from making this film. A documentary should not pretend to have all the answers. Rather, it should honestly acknowledge the limits of what we can know.
And what did you learn about yourself?
That the hardest part was not confronting my grandfather's past. The hardest part was accepting that not everything can be explained. For many years, I kept returning to the same question: “Why?” Why my grandfather? Why that day? Why did silence prevail in our family for so many years?
Today, I still ask myself those same questions, but I no longer expect simple answers. I think maturity sometimes lies in learning to live with questions that may never be answered once and for all.
If you had to describe, in a single sentence, what ‘Amnesia’ is really about, what would you say?
I would say it is an attempt to begin a conversation. Not with history – for history will always remain the subject of research and debate – but with people. With my own family. With my own city. And, in a way, with myself. Because as long as we keep talking, memory remains alive. The greatest danger is not that we do not have all the answers. The greatest danger comes when we stop asking questions.
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Piotr Piwowarczyk is a screenwriter and documentary film producer born in Kielce, who has been living in Mexico for more than a decade. He produced the In the ‘Name of Their Mothers’ (2010), dedicated to Irena Sendler and the women who rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. In 2022, he also co-created the libretto for a musical drama devoted to the same historical figure. He co-wrote the screenplay for ‘Santa Rosa – Odyssey in the Rhythm of Mariachi’ (2013), which tells the story of Polish refugees who found shelter during the Second World War at the Santa Rosa hacienda in Mexico. He is the protagonist and co-screenwriter of ‘Amnesia’ (2015), a documentary that traces his deeply personal investigation into his grandfather’s involvement in the Kielce pogrom.