Polish Diaspora
Work in progress 2008-2026
For centuries, Poles have left their homeland. Some left in search of work or a better life. Others were pushed out by history: after uprisings, wars, political repression, poverty, changing borders, and systems that took away the freedom to choose. Migration was not an exception in the Polish experience, but one of its constant patterns.
Over time, emigration became surrounded by myth — romantic, patriotic, heroic. It was often remembered as sacrifice, mission, or historical duty. Less often as loneliness, hard labour, divided families, and lives lived between two worlds.
Polish Diaspora is a long-term documentary project about Poles living outside Poland. It follows communities across Europe, North and South America, Australia, and elsewhere. It also includes people who remained in places once linked to Polish history and culture, where borders changed faster than human lives.
The project explores the story of a nation whose large part has lived for generations in movement, exile, migration, or dispersion.
I am interested in people from different waves of migration and different social backgrounds: descendants of earlier emigrants in Chicago, Buenos Aires, or northern France; families of political refugees in London and Paris; workers, nurses, drivers, business owners, artists, and academics building new lives today in Berlin, Dublin, Oslo, or Brussels.
I also look at Polish communities in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, and other parts of Eastern Europe, where memory of origin continues beside other languages and traditions.
The project focuses on everyday life, because this is where history becomes visible. In homes built far from Poland, and in homes standing where Poland once was. In bakeries, churches, clubs, workshops, restaurants, cemeteries, family albums, and objects kept across generations. In language that weakens in the second generation and sometimes returns in the third.
This is a story about pride and shame, success and uprooting, belonging and distance. About how identity changes when it meets other languages, religions, classes, and landscapes. Sometimes diaspora begins with a journey. Sometimes it begins when a border moves without asking the people who live there.
The project is built slowly through travel, conversations, returns to the same places, and work with family archives. It may take the form of many chapters, publications, and separate stories, because the Polish diaspora cannot fit into one narrative.
It is an attempt to document an experience that helped shape modern Polish history: life lived far from home, beside home, or in places where the meaning of home changed over time.