History of a disappearance
Subtitle: the story of a forgotten Polish town
By: Filip Springer ; translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye
Contributors: Bye, Sean Gasper, translator
Edition: First Restless Books paperback edition.
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 318
ISBN-13: 9781632061157
Subjects: Personal narratives; History
Work titles: Miedzianka
Description: Lying at the crucible of Central Europe, the Silesian village of Kupferberg suffered the violence of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the 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.
Notes: Translation of: Miedzianka : historia znikania.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 314-318).

Translated from the Polish.