Returning to Poland: Memory, Trauma and the Stories We Carry
At Mówmi Studio, much of our work revolves around history — particularly the history and culture of Polish Jews. We are interested in the ways the past continues to shape the present, in forgotten biographies, disrupted communities and the traces left behind by people whose worlds were destroyed.
But the opportunity to work with living, unfolding stories is something we value just as deeply.
Stories in which history is not only reconstructed through archives, photographs and testimonies, but is still actively present in people’s relationships, emotions and decisions. Stories that continue to change while we are filming them.
This is one of those stories.
In mid-August, after waiting for almost a year for this particular moment, Carmel Tanaka and her mother, Dalia Gottlieb-Tanaka, arrived in Poland. Over the course of two weeks, we spent one week in Białystok and the surrounding region, followed by another week in Warsaw, documenting what became an important new chapter in the development of our documentary project.
Their journey brought together family history, public commemoration and filmmaking. But it also revealed something we could not have fully anticipated before the cameras started rolling: a story about trauma, conflicting memories, the passage of time and the relationship between a mother and daughter experiencing that passage of time together.
A Return That Was Never Supposed to Happen
Perhaps the most significant fact about the journey was that Dalia came to Poland at all.
In a documentary report about Carmel that we filmed the previous year, Dalia said clearly that she would never come to Poland. Her relationship with the country was shaped by the history of her family, by the Holocaust and by the experiences of her mother, Szyfra Atłasowicz, a Białystok Jew who survived the war.
Yet in August, Dalia arrived.
As she explained, the main reason was the commemoration of her family.
During the visit, Stolpersteine — Stones of Remembrance — were installed in Białystok in memory of Szyfra, Mosze and Abram Atłasowicz. The ceremony brought members of the family together across generations and continents.
Among them was Tracey, a cousin from Texas, who travelled to Poland specifically for the Stolpersteine ceremony. For Carmel and Dalia, it was also the first time they had met her in person.
The commemoration therefore became more than a public event. It was also a family encounter — one made possible by a history that, despite displacement, migration and decades of separation, continued to connect people who had never previously shared the same physical space.
For Carmel and Dalia, however, the meaning of the journey was not necessarily the same.
One of the central elements of the documentary we are developing is precisely this difference between them. They belong to the same family and carry the same history, but they approach memory, Jewish identity and the past in very different ways.
Their relationship is shaped by affection and closeness, but also by disagreement, tension and fundamentally different ways of interpreting the stories they have inherited.
Seeing a Home That No Longer Exists
One of the more difficult aspects of filming in Białystok was navigating a city whose physical landscape has changed so profoundly.
Carmel and Dalia were coming to the place from which their family originated, but much of the Białystok known to Szyfra and the Atłasowicz family is no longer visible in the city itself.
The pre-war Jewish world has disappeared. Much of the city was destroyed during the war, while post-war reconstruction and later urban development transformed the physical landscape again. Moving through these places therefore often meant standing in spaces where history was present in memory and documents, but difficult to locate in the contemporary city.
For Carmel and Dalia, this was particularly striking when they encountered the place where Szyfra’s family home had once stood.
The house has not existed since the 1980s.
They saw the location for the first time, but there was no longer a house to enter, recognise or physically connect with. The encounter was therefore shaped by an absence: the experience of arriving somewhere that is important precisely because what once stood there is gone.
This tension between presence and disappearance runs throughout the story we are trying to tell.
The Premiere of Atłasowicz
During the visit, we also held the premiere screening of the short animated documentary Atłasowicz, directed by Łukasz K. Kamiński.
For Carmel and Dalia, it was their first time seeing the film.
The animation tells the story of Szyfra Atłasowicz, a Jewish woman from Białystok who survived the Holocaust. She was the daughter of Abram Atłasowicz, the owner of the pre-war vegetable oil factory Białol.
After being deported to the Soviet Union during the war, Szyfra managed to return to Białystok for several days. What she encountered was a profoundly transformed city.
Large parts of Białystok had been destroyed. The Jewish community that had once formed an essential part of the city’s life had almost entirely disappeared.
And when Szyfra returned to her family home, somebody else was living there.
The short film focuses on this moment of return: the experience of coming back to a familiar place and discovering that almost everything connected to one’s previous life has disappeared.
The premiere screening was followed by a public meeting with Carmel Tanaka and Dalia Gottlieb-Tanaka at the Ludwik Zamenhof Centre in Białystok.
During the visit, the programme also included a city walk following the traces of the Atłasowicz family, prepared and led by Izabela Szymańska.
The screening of Atłasowicz was also the culmination of the artistic scholarship programme of the Mayor of the City of Białystok, “Atłasowicz – a short, experimental and animated documentary film”, carried out by Łukasz Kamil Kamiński in the fields of film, digital culture and intermedia.
More Than One Version of the Same Story
The longer we work with Carmel and Dalia, the clearer it becomes that this documentary is not primarily about reconstructing one definitive version of a family’s past.
It is about what happens when several versions of that past coexist.
At the centre of the film is the figure of Szyfra. Her post-war return to Białystok and the decisions she later made within her family exist in different forms: in archival documents, recorded testimonies and stories passed down from one generation to another.
These narratives do not always align.
Carmel tends to approach the past through research, archival material and documentary evidence. Dalia places greater trust in family memory and in the stories she heard directly from her mother.
Their perspectives can contradict each other.
And yet the film is gradually becoming less interested in resolving those contradictions.
Instead, we are increasingly interested in what these contradictions do to people.
What happens when a document challenges something a family has believed for decades? What happens when someone’s testimony does not match the story passed down through generations? Can there be more than one emotional truth even when the historical facts remain uncertain?
During the journey through Poland, these questions became tangible.
They were present not only in conversations about history, but in the relationship between Carmel and Dalia themselves.
Trauma Is Not Something That Can Simply Be Healed
Another important dimension of the project concerns intergenerational trauma.
The experiences of one generation can continue to affect later generations through family relationships, patterns of communication, silence, avoidance and emotional responses. In families affected by war, persecution, displacement and genocide, history is often transmitted not only through what is remembered and discussed, but also through what is never spoken about.
In the case of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, this process has been explored through different psychological, social and cultural perspectives.
But we are careful not to treat trauma as something that can simply be cured.
The past cannot be undone.
Neither can a single journey, conversation or artistic project remove the effects of experiences that have shaped a family over generations.
Perhaps the more meaningful question is whether it is possible to interrupt certain cycles.
To recognise patterns of silence. To name emotions that were previously left unnamed. To allow a story to be questioned rather than simply inherited. To create space for another generation to relate to the past differently.
And perhaps this is one of the most tangible forms that working with intergenerational trauma can take.
For Carmel, this process includes artistic practice. She is currently creating an autobiographical comic book based on her family history. Through drawing and storytelling, she works with experiences that are fragmented, contradictory and sometimes impossible to reconstruct completely.
Art becomes not a way of solving history, but a way of staying with it.
Another dimension involves spiritual and personal practices. Carmel’s relationship with family history often takes place not only through research and factual knowledge, but through physical gestures, rituals and emotional encounters with places.
Dalia’s decision to come to Poland can also be understood as part of this wider process.
She had previously said she would never make this journey.
Coming to Poland did not erase her anger, nor did it transform her relationship with the country into a simple story of reconciliation. But it created a new experience — one that had previously seemed impossible.
A Mother, a Daughter and the Passage of Time
The August filming also revealed another dimension of the documentary.
It is a film about time passing.
Dalia is now 76 years old and has difficulty walking long distances. During the visit, she said that this was her first and last visit to Poland.
This gave the journey a particular emotional weight.
The visit was not simply another research trip that could easily be repeated in the future. There was an awareness that some experiences have a limited window of possibility.
For Carmel and Dalia, the journey therefore became something they were experiencing together, while also confronting the reality that their relationship — like every relationship between a parent and an adult child — exists within time.
This is something we had not fully understood when we first began working on the project.
The documentary is increasingly becoming not only a story about a grandmother and the history she left behind.
It is also about a daughter and a mother trying to find their own ways of living with that history while their relationship continues to change.
And perhaps filmmaking itself becomes part of this process: an attempt to spend time together, to record conversations, disagreements and moments that cannot be repeated indefinitely.
From Białystok to Warsaw — and Eventually Vancouver
The two weeks in Poland took us from Białystok and the surrounding region to Warsaw.
Beyond the public events, we accompanied Carmel and Dalia through the quieter parts of the journey: conversations, encounters with places connected to their family and the moments in between official commemorations.
The August filming was made possible through two projects: the Big Picture Association’s “History Opens. In the Footsteps of the Atłasowicz Family”, funded by the City of Białystok, and the Open Education Foundation’s “A Stone and Two Roads. Białystok – Vancouver – Memory”, supported through the grant programme of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland.
The documentary itself is also being developed as part of DOK PRO at the Wajda School in Warsaw.
We are now at an important stage in the development of the project.
Following exploratory and test filming in the summers of 2025 and 2026, we are currently working on the possibilities of continuing production. The main part of the future filming is planned to take place in Vancouver, Canada, where Carmel Tanaka and Dalia Gottlieb-Tanaka live.
This is where the story will continue beyond the journey to Poland.
A Story That Cannot Be Closed
The longer we work on this film, the clearer it becomes that it may never offer one definitive version of the Atłasowicz family history.
And perhaps it should not.
The contradictions between archival documents, personal testimony and family memory are not simply obstacles that need to be removed. They are part of the story itself.
For us, the question is increasingly not only what happened.
It is also what happens to people when they try to understand what happened — and discover that certainty may not be possible.
The journey to Poland did not resolve Carmel and Dalia’s relationship with their family history. It did not eliminate the differences between them, and it did not provide a single narrative capable of explaining everything.
But it created new experiences.
It brought family members together who had never met before. It brought Dalia to a country she once believed she would never visit. It allowed Carmel and Dalia to stand together in places connected to their family, even when those places had almost entirely disappeared from the contemporary landscape.
And it opened another chapter in a story that is still unfolding.
We are now continuing our production efforts to make it possible to follow Carmel and Dalia further — from Białystok and Warsaw to Vancouver — and to continue developing this intimate documentary about family history, memory, inherited emotions and the complicated process of learning how to live with stories that may never be fully resolved.
The August filming was carried out by a small team:
- Director: Łukasz K. Kamiński
- Cinematography: Kajetan Falkowski
- Production support: Aleksandra Konieczna
For us, this is perhaps the most valuable aspect of working with a living story: unlike history contained entirely within an archive, we do not yet know exactly where this film will lead.
The story is still being written — by memory, by conversation, by disagreement, by time, and by the lives of the people whose experiences we are trying to understand.