Titled The Home I Won’t Return to… Lwów 1944–1946, the show opened last Saturday and runs through October 31 at the Orsetti House Museum.
Mateusz Werner, director of the Department of Culture and National Heritage in the regional capital Rzeszów, said the exhibition "honors those who had to leave their homes," while also showing how their later lives contributed to the rebuilding of towns and communities across what is now southeastern Poland.
The exhibition focuses on the human dimension of forced migration, rather than its political or military aspects.
It features photographs, documents, personal belongings and testimonies from families who were displaced from present-day Lviv and eventually resettled in Jarosław and surrounding areas.
Bożena Buszta-Korman, the exhibition’s curator and a senior museum custodian, recalled that under the terms of the 1945 agreement between the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, Poland permanently lost its eastern territories, known as Kresy Wschodnie.
However, the deportation of Poles had already begun in the autumn of 1944.
“Lviv, once one of the most important cities in Poland, a center of science, culture and the arts, became a symbol of the loss of the Eastern Borderlands,” Buszta-Korman said.
For many Poles, she added, losing it meant not only leaving home but also suffering “a profound rupture from their heritage, history and culture.”
Konrad Sawiński, director of the Jarosław museum, said the exhibition invited empathy by telling the personal stories of those who found new homes in the region but continued to live with the painful memory of a lost homeland.
The show is part of a broader cultural program marking the 80th anniversary of the postwar expulsion of Poles from the eastern territories.
It also forms part of the annual Festival of Borderland Heritage, currently taking place in Poland's southeastern Podkarpacie region.
Objects on display come from the Orsetti House Museum's own collections, the Regional Museum in Stalowa Wola, the National Museum of the Przemyśl Region and private individuals.
Archival materials and photographs were also provided by the Ossolineum National Library, the State Archives, the National Digital Archives, the United Nations Archive in New York, and Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).
The late-Renaissance Orsetti and Attavanti Houses in the town’s market square owe their names to Wilhelm Orsetti and Giulio Attavanti, Italian merchants who owned them in the 17th century. The buildings are now home to a local museum and the town’s Culture and Promotion Centre.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP, muzeum-jaroslaw.pl