The painterly gesture comes from Pop Art, so the motif is all the more shocking: A woman looks out of a car with a troubled look at the gates of the Auschwitz extermination camp, lush green meadows shimmer in the exterior mirror. She is not one of the millions of visitors who make a pilgrimage to the memorial every year. As a Krakow woman, she occasionally passes this historically charged place on her way home, like once after a New Year's Eve party that she attended with her husband Wilhelm Sasnal. The world-famous painter and filmmaker used the captured moment for one of his latest paintings, which can now be seen in the Polin Museum in Warsaw.

The weight of the Polish landscape runs through his work like a blood-stained red thread. The forty-eight-year-old has been grappling with the past for two decades, which may also be due to the fact that sections of Polish society, including the current government, take a selective look at their own roles. How difficult it is for some to recognize that on the one hand the country fell victim to Nazi Germany, but on the other hand there were quite a few Poles who participated in the plundering and murder of Polish Jews, this is what the around sixty paintings and drawings in the exhibition are about "Such a landscape".

Sasnal's last solo exhibition in Poland at the Zachęta National Art Gallery was fourteen years ago. The fact that he is now ending the long period of absence in the Polin, the museum of the history of Polish Jews in the heart of the former Jewish quarter and the later ghetto, can confidently be interpreted as a challenge to all deniers and relativists. Because nothing in this exhibition is what it seems, not the train tracks that run straight through the landscape, not the heap of cabbages, actually a harmless, almost abstract still life that, in the vicinity of the other paintings, shows a mountain of skulls in a mass grave device.

His interest in Jewish topics comes from an unconscious sense of absence, says Sasnal. “Or maybe because of the guilt I owe for being a Pole who was brought up in the Christian tradition.” Therefore, of course, the people in the portraits are not chosen at random. There is the “brown bishop” Alois Hudal, who helped Nazi criminals escape after the war. Or Father Trzeciak, one of the leading ideologues of pre-war anti-Semitism, flanked by the French painter Edgar Degas, a violent Jew-hater who draws the link to European anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century. Several actors appear a few steps further in the monumental chronicle “The Synagogue in Mościce”. Sasnal uses black ink to review the history of his home district of Tarnów,until the fictional future of 2028, when a modernist synagogue was built. The alternative vision is tough, because the Holocaust never took place here, and in Poland and Germany kibbutzim were set up instead of concentration camps in the early 1940s.