Introduction

The problem of the relationship between the city and memory enters European thought in a significant way with the peak of modernity in the early 20th century and the rapid, disorientating urbanization that this period brought. The descendants of the devastated Jewish communities of eastern Europe retain a powerful memory of the places they left behind, and also provide tourist markets for cities like Krakow, Vilnius or Warsaw. The potentially disruptive impact of urban change on memory is a key theme in Paul Connerton’s writing on modernity’s ‘problem with forgetting’. All in all, the period between 1939 and 1949, which the historian of 20th-century displacement Dariusz Stola calls the ‘black decade’, was one of the most catastrophic in Europe’s history in terms of the forced mass movement of people. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.