POLIN’s Museum on Wheels in Rural Poland: Travelling Museum and Localised Interests of Visitors

Museums over the past decades have been seeking to place visitors with their interests and needs in the centre of attention. Yet, some of the attempts to create outreach projects which respond to the audiences’ interests insufficiently recognise visitor’s needs and interests. As a result, a mismatch between the museum’s intentions and the visitors’ experiences may appear. This chapter analyses an example of such an outreach project, a travelling initiative of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum, Museum on Wheels (MoW), run in rural Poland between 2014 and 2017. The mobile museum sought to encourage learning about Jewish history and culture in Poland throughout centuries. Yet, for the visitors, the focus of POLIN on the stories about continuity of Jewish life in Poland remained in tension with their needs to address Jewish absence and to talk about the Holocaust in their towns (Kubica and Van de Putte 2019). This chapter examines this tension in-depth. The analysis of two interviews with visitors conducted in 2015 demonstrates that, in locals’ responses to MoW, discussing Jewish absence, using allosemitic (Bauman 1998) and nostalgic tropes, provided a vocabulary with which to negotiate the inclusion and exclusion of Jews into and from rural memoryscapes (Kapralski 2011) in Poland.