History of a disappearance : the story of a forgotten Polish town /

The story of a small Polish town's decline and eventual abandonment as a consequence of its long and fraught relationship with the mines that surround it serves as an environmental cautionary tale as well as a tender elegy for a hardscrabble community that never truly thrived yet survived difficult times. Nestled in the Sudeten Mountains of Upper Silesia, Miedzianka (until 1945 known as Kupferberg) long allured outsiders with the promise of mineral wealth, and even though their efforts would mostly fail in the long run, they at least provided mining jobs for the locals. Good mountain water was the secret to the taste of Kupferberg Gold sparkling wine, the town's other significant industry. Over the years the town saw more than its share of personal tragedies and hardships, and wartime privation, but it wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century, when the Soviets discovered an abundance of uranium, that the actual existence of the town was threatened, as its people began suffering from radiation-related health problems and its buildings began to be swallowed up by sinkholes. Structures that long defined the town the church, the winery, the manor house collapsed or were left to fall into disrepair. The old German cemetery coughed up its bones. If Springer's approach is unconventional, rejecting strict chronology in favor of an overlapping collage of individual stories, it's also understated, finding poignancy in telling details.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2017 Booklist

An evocative study of a town in Poland's outback, one scarcely known even in its day.Miedzianka in Polish, Kupferberg in German, is a place off anyone's map: "history never well and truly arrived here," writes freelance journalist Springer, "but instead roamed around in the vicinity." And did it ever: the town was already old when, as the author puts it, "armed hordes begin to make their way across Europe," some of them the soldiers of the Thirty Years' War, others members of the SS, rooting out Jews and other undesirables in a region known as Silesia. Thanks in part to German excesses, the town became part of Poland after the war, but it had already begun to disappear, parts of it caving in thanks to the collapse of abandoned mine shafts, its streets deserted after the mining companies went under, so that even in 1840, only nine villagers identified themselves as miners. Springer points out the various enemies, structural and human, that have come calling on Miedzianka only as "the beast," and the beast has many forms, such as the rockets of Joseph Stalin's invading Red Armyahead of whose arrival some villagers headed west, while the Nazi stalwarts of the town tried to escape but found no place to run. Now, writes Springer, "Miedzianka is simply gone," marked by a rather nondescript memorial to those who lived and worked there over the centuries, a small obelisk to record the fact that here there once stood a town and a miniature civilization. Yet, amazingly, this book, published in Poland in 2011, sparked a modest revival of the town: a theater company has staged a performance of a play based on the book, while private investors have banded together to open a brewery in a place once renowned for its beer. The result, writes the author, is that "what once seemed an absolute end was only a pause." Lucid and literate: a brilliant model of historical writing about place and a beguiling treat for armchair travelers as well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.