Muzeum Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie, Warszawa

Muzeum Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie fills the reconstructed eighteenth-century tenement on Freta Street, where Maria Skłodowska-Curie was born in eighteen sixty-seven. This is a biographical museum devoted to the Polish scientist whose discoveries included polonium and radium, and whose work earned her two Nobel Prizes. Her family moved away during her infancy, so this house was her home for less than a year.

Notice the plaque set into the street wall. German forces deliberately destroyed this building during the Warsaw Uprising, yet the plaque survived; it returned when the house was rebuilt after the war. That small survivor gives the address an unusual continuity through the city’s devastation.

The museum began in nineteen sixty-seven, marking a century since Curie’s birth. Its inauguration brought together her younger daughter, Eve Curie Labouisse, her diplomat husband Henry Richardson Labouisse Junior, and nine Nobel laureates. Inside, personal possessions, letters, documents, photographs, medals, stamps, and material linked to Pierre Curie turn an immense scientific reputation into the texture of a family life. The story also follows her work in France and her part in creating radium institutes in Paris and Warsaw.