Biography | Marie Curie — Born in the Boarding House on Freta Street

People treat Freta 16 as the house where Maria Skłodowska grew up.

She was born here on 7 November 1867. The family left before her first birthday.

The building was then an 18th-century tenement, the Łyszkiewicz house, in Warsaw's New Town. From 1848 it held a girls' boarding school. Her mother, Bronisława, ran that school from 1859.

The Skłodowskis lived in a smaller rear building behind the school rooms. In 1868 they moved to Nowolipki Street. That later address was destroyed in the Second World War and was never rebuilt.

This house was destroyed too. After the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, German forces leveled the New Town. The plaque that had been fixed here in 1932 survived. The street front was reconstructed in 1951–1954.

What stands on the pin today is that reconstruction, not the rooms of 1867.

On 16 October 1967, the centenary of her birth, the Polish Chemical Society opened a biographical museum in the rebuilt house. Ève Curie Labouisse, the younger daughter, was present at the inauguration.

The museum is now a city institution. It occupies the floors from basement to attic after a 2017 refit.

The first fact worth standing here for is not a childhood idyll. It is a birth in a school building under Russian partition, in a family of teachers, in a house that would be erased and then rebuilt around her name.

Photo: Bjørn Erik Pedersen, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons. Facade and plaque photographs by later visitors also circulate under CC licences.