About the Project

In 1947, Nathan Drew dictated his Holocaust survival story to his wife Helen. The memoir, now published as The Counterfeit Poles, traces his life in occupied Poland: the Soviet occupation, the German occupation, the creation of the Łomża Ghetto, his escape to Warsaw, and his years passing as a Pole in the capital. Nathan meticulously recorded the names of everyone he remembered, noting the addresses where they lived and worked. In some cases, his account is the only remaining testament to their existence.

This project grew out of that memoir. Working with Łomża history teacher Marcin Mikołajczyk and his students, local public historians, and the Drew family, we built a collaborative digital memorial that maps Nathan's testimony onto the streets of his Łomża and Warsaw. The maps layer three historical periods (present-day, 1942, and 1940), allowing users to move between Nathan's city and today's. At individual markers, visitors can meet the people Nathan named, read passages from the memoir, and hear testimonies from survivors.

The project is as much about the present as the past. It brought together current citizens of Łomża, descendants of its former Jewish community, scholars, and educators, each carrying different knowledge of the city and different investments in how its history is told. Out of that dialogue came the map. The shared world we built on it, in turn, helped bring the Drew family and the Łomża community together at the 80th anniversary of the ghetto's liquidation in November 2022.

The maps are not only a memorial but a record of dialogue: between Jews and Poles, past and present, the virtual and the real. The project is dedicated, as Nathan writes, "to the six million who could not tell their own stories."