Safe house
How do you define a Safe house?
I am so pleased to share the publication of my essay, Safe house, in About Place Journal, a publication that examines ‘place’ as living terrain shaped by politics, memory, identity and history.
The essay opens in September 1989 in a small Virginia hospital, where my mother, in her final days, kept her hand trained to a short-wave radio, listening to the broadcast reports of Solidarnosc—Poland’s first partly-free elected coalition since 1945. Marched out of Warsaw in 1944 as a prisoner of war, she never returned to her homeland, ultimately living across eleven countries and four continents, always searching for the world she had lost.
The narrative follows a physical and emotional journey to Warsaw and Kalisz, tracing the facades of the buildings where my mother and her family once sought shelter. From 54 Towarowa Street—a tenement building that miraculously survived the initial bombings only to be the site of wartime massacres—to the quiet, tree-lined streets of her childhood, I examine how these concrete structures hold the ghosts of an erased history. Safe house connects these war time safe houses to my own upbringing.
“Looking out from the window of my study, stationed somewhere between the shelves of my books, I have been thinking about my mother’s inability to shelter, no matter how many times she moved. I have been thinking about how her search for a safe house became mine.”
You can read the complete piece in About Place Journal: https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/the-ground-beneath-us/hidden-depths/alexandra-anastasia-viets
