Do Birds Sing Here?

When we think about a certain area or a landscape, we sometimes wonder what might have happened in that place seventy, eighty, or even a hundred years ago. These places don’t evoke mistrust. They’re seamlessly woven into our lives. We pass them daily or perhaps visit them during brief vacations. We ask ourselves: Does this landscape hide something from us? Is it innocent? Or is it just a façade? If we were to dig into the ground, would we uncover something unpleasant—decayed bones? Should we lay them back, forget about them because it doesn’t concern us, because it happened so long ago? Or should we face the terrifying and uncomfortable truths? The landscape can answer our questions and help us understand and feel what once happened and why we must confront history.

The idea behind this comic is to construct a narrative where the world of the past interweaves with the present. The memories of author’s grandfather, Edward Hałoń, who lived through World War II and authored the book “In the Shadow of Auschwitz,” published in 2003 by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and those of his brother, Kazimierz Hałoń, author of “In Work and Struggle,” published in 1996 by the Center for the Dissemination of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciencs, form the foundation of this project.

The book consists of two parts: one chronicles author’s journeys across Poland to places significant to her family’s history (such as Oświęcim, Brzeszcze, and Kraków), while the other reconstructs, based on Kazimierz Hałoń’s memoirs, his time in the camp and his spectacular, successful escape.

The author received the Krakow UNESCO City of Literature Prize and financial support for this project.