Holocaust remembrance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 80 years on

MONIKA SIERADZKA

Torn items of clothing, broken crockery, a rusted baby carriage — the objects laid out on temporary mats in the former children’s hospital in Warsaw bear witness to brutally destroyed Jewish lives.

All sorts of things are to be found here: from pots to precious jewellery and “tefillin,” the leather straps that Jews wear while praying. The items were dug up during the ongoing archeological work on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, which began in the summer of 2022.

The Germans, who had occupied Poland since the fall of 1939, set up the Ghetto in October 1940. It was the biggest Jewish ghetto in the occupied regions of Europe. And it was from here that 300,000 people were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers of the extermination camps.

For historian Albert Stankowski, a charred door handle with a key still inserted in its keyhole is particularly symbolic. He is moved as he picks it up very cautiously with his white-gloved hands.

“Keys and doors are a symbol of home. And these people never returned to their apartments, to their houses. They were deported or buried under rubble,” he says. Stankowski explains why the key is in the keyhole.

“When people were deported to the concentration camps, there was an order from the Germans that Jews had to leave their keys in the door so that the Nazi occupiers could take the apartments over without delay,” he relates.

This archeological find will be exhibited in the Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto alongside many others. The museum is currently being created in the former hospital building and is to be opened in 2025. Most of the objects come from Mila Street, where the bunker housing the headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) was located in 1943.

Members of the ZOB joined with the Jewish Military Union (ZZW) and other resistance groups to rise up against the German occupiers. Their motto was that it was better to die fighting than be burned to ashes in the crematorium of an extermination camp.

After the deportation of some 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp northeast of Warsaw in the summer of 1942, there were only an estimated 50,000 people left living in the Warsaw Ghetto in spring 1943.

The only way out of this ghetto hell seemed to lead to the gas chamber. The SS planned to dissolve the Ghetto in the course of 1943.

Before the Second World War, there were almost 3.5 million Jews living in Poland, making up 10% of the population. In Warsaw, it was 30%. During the Holocaust, 3 million Polish Jews were murdered; only a few hundreds of thousands survived.

After the war, most of the survivors left Poland, partly because of anti-Jewish pogroms. For many Jewish people, the country had become just one big cemetery holding their loved ones and their entire former lives.

Albert Stankowski stresses that this year, unlike in earlier years, there will barely be any eyewitnesses of the events back then attending commemorative events. “My generation still had grandparents that we could ask. My children don’t have this chance anymore,” the 50-year-old says.

For this reason, he says, it is all the more important that the message embodied by this day goes out to the entire world: “There are people even today who deny the Holocaust. And there are barely any eyewitnesses who can be asked about it. That is why this moment of commemoration is partly there to show that this unimaginable crime really took place and that so many millions of people lost their lives.”