Approximately 50,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in

occupied Poland and Ukraine, some of them using hideouts.

Driven by necessity, they were forced to seek refuge

in unlikely and seemingly unsuited places such as tree

hollows, closets, basements or sewers-staying there for

days, and sometimes even years. They are a testament to

the architectural creativity of those who had to secure the

basic means of sustaining life with minimal resources,

without being able to radically alter the space available

to them.







Architect, scholar and artist Natalia Romik has identified

and studied several hideouts that still exist today.

Her research, resulting in the exhibition



Hideouts. The

Architecture of Survival

, accentuates the material and spatial

dimensions of living in hiding, gathering the evidence

of vernacular, architectural creativity employed under

lifethreatening conditions. This interdisciplinary catalogue,

addresses the fundamental question of the function

of architecture in relation to the history of violence

and our culture of commemoration.





A graduate in political science, practitioner of architecture and artist, NATALIA ROMIK (*1983, Warsaw) received a PhD at Londons Bartlett School of Architecture in 2018. Romik has been awarded numerous grants, including the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, and the Scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland. Currently she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah in Paris.