Ghetto Heroes' Memorial

Pomnik Bohaterów Getta

In the autumn of 1940, the German occupying forces established the largest ghetto in occupied Europe in the Polish capital Warsaw. On April 19, 1943, the »Jewish Combat Organisation« (Polish: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa) launched an uprising against the German troops who were preparing the final deportations from the ghetto. In 1948, a memorial was dedicated to the ghetto fighters.

History

Before World War II, Warsaw was home to the largest Jewish community in Poland, comprising of 350,000 members. Following the invasion of Poland, the German Wehrmacht took Warsaw at the end of September 1939. The German administration immediately began depriving Jews of basic rights, and frequent attacks, expropriation and labelling determined their everyday life. Already in November 1939, the district of Muranów, to a large part inhabited by Jews, was declared a »Seuchensperrgebiet« - a territory endangered with epidemics.
On October 2, 1940, the governor of the Warsaw district, Dr. Ludwig Fischer, ordered the establishment of a closed ghetto in this area. Within six weeks, all Jews had to move to the ghetto, while the non-Jews had to leave their homes for other parts of town. Over 410,000 people were crowded into the ghetto. From mid-November 1940 on, the ghetto was separated from the rest of the city by a 3-metre high wall.
The ghetto was to be dissolved as part of »Aktion Reinhardt«, the systematic murder of the Jews in the General Government. Deportations from the ghetto began on July 22, 1942. Until September 12, the SS, assisted by Jewish police units, deported up to 10,000 people daily to the Treblinka death camp, north-east of Warsaw.
There were about 60,000 people left in the ghetto after the »Grosse Aktion«. Several hundred of them formed the »Jewish Combat Organisation«. When over 2,000 members of the SS, police and Wehrmacht, commanded by Jürgen Stroop, wanted to forcibly clear the ghetto on April 19, 1943, an armed uprising was launched. The fighting lasted over a month. Stroop's troops burned down the ghetto bit by bit, until they finally suppressed the uprising in mid-May 1943.
In August 1943, by order of Heinrich Himmler a concentration camp was set up on the completely pulverized premises of the former ghetto.

Warsaw, undated, Pre-war postcard of Warsaw, Stiftung Denkmal

Warsaw, 1948, Dedication of the memorial in the ruins of Warsaw, Yad Vashem

Victims

Apart from Warsaw Jews, an additional 50,000 Jews from surrounding areas had to move into the ghetto. In addition, the German authorities deported thousands of Jews from Bohemia and the German Reich as well as Sinti and Roma from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to the Warsaw Ghetto. About 100,000 Jews died of hunger or illnesses in the ghetto due to a policy of deliberate underprovision.
Between July 22 and September 12, 1942, in the course of the systematic deportations referred to as the »Grosse Aktion«, some 254,000 Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered in the gas chambers.
About 12,000 Jews died during the Ghetto Uprising, almost all of them resistance fighters. Many died when residential houses were blown up or streets were burned down by SS, police and Wehrmacht units. About 7,000 survivors of the uprising were deported to Treblinka and over 40,000 to various labour camps in the Lublin District.
Only a few resistance fighters managed to escape after the uprising; many of them subsequently joined partisan groups or Polish resistance groups. Of the 500,000 Warsaw Ghetto inmates in total, only a few thousand lived to see the end of the war.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

A first memorial sign in the memory of the ghetto uprising was established already in 1946. Right next to it, the »Ghetto Heroes' Memorial« was dedicated on April 19, 1948, the fifth anniversary of the uprising. It was erected on the initiative of Jewish organisations and financed by donations. At first, the monument by Nathan Rapoport stood alone in the demolished landscape where the ghetto once was. The memorial has two sides: depicted on one side are seven heroic, larger-than-life bronze figures, while the other side portrays figures with bowed heads, walking towards their deaths.
In 1967, at a time when anti-Semitic sentiments were gaining ground in the People's Republic of Poland and Jewish life in Poland seemed threatened, the Israeli memorial »Yad Vashem« reproduced the memorial. Until the 1980s, the square in front of the memorial was used for official commemorative ceremonies. In December 1970, West German chancellor Willy Brandt dropped to his knees in front of the memorial. His gesture - and the photos which circled the world - made the memorial famous worldwide.
In the 1980s, the »Solidarność« opposition movement, founded during the 1980-81 strikes in Gdańsk, began gathering at the memorial, making it an assembly point for critics of the system and a symbol of resistance against the communist regime.
In 2013, on the 70th anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was inaugurated right next to the memorial.

Warsaw, April-May 1943, German soldiers arrest resistance fighters in the ghetto, Yad Vashem

Warsaw, 2005, Detailed view of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Jürgen Lillteicher

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

ul. Zamenhofa
00-165 Warszawa

Warsaw, 2006, Relief on the back of the memorial, Georg Mayr

Warsaw, 2013, Side view of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal

Warsaw, 2013, Memorial from 1946 in front of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Stiftung Denkmal

Warsaw, 2013, Ghetto Heroes' Memorial in front of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Stiftung Denkmal

Warsaw, 2013, Detailed view of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal

Warsaw, 2005, Ghetto Heroes' Memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Jürgen Lillteicher

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