House of Remembrance of the Jews of Upper Silesia

Dom Pamięci Żydów Górnośląskich

In Gliwice (German: Gleiwitz) a small museum commemorates the history of the Jews of Upper Silesia since 2019. The former ceremonial hall of the Jewish cemetery in which it is located is itself an outstanding testimony to the history of Jewish culture in the region.

History

The Upper Silesian town of Gliwice (German: Gleiwitz) was first mentioned in the 13th century. Between 1526 and 1742 Gliwice belonged to Habsburg, then to Prussia. The first small Jewish community was founded in 1750. After Jews were granted the right to settle in Silesian towns in 1808, the first synagogue in Gliwice was inaugurated around 1811. The full political equality of the Jews was achieved in 1847. The period up to the First World War was marked by strong economic growth throughout Upper Silesia. At the same time, it was also the heyday of Jewish life in the region. Among the Gliwice Jews there were numerous civil servants, city councillors and entrepreneurs. During the First World War, 57 Gliwice Jews in German uniforms died on the front. After the war Upper Silesia was divided between Germany and Poland. After a referendum in 1921, in which also the majority of Jews voted for Germany, Gleiwitz stayed with the German Reich and from then on was in the immediate vicinity of the Polish border. The following years proved economically difficult and many Jews moved away from Gliwice.
After their accession to power, as in many other places, National Socialists carried out boycotts against Jewish businesses in Gliwice on April 1, 1933. Jews were gradually forced out of public life and their professions. At the end of the 1930s, many of them emigrated. In November 1938, Nazis burned down the synagogue, destroyed all Jewish businesses, and arrested about 230 Jewish men, who were then deported to concentration camps.
In 1939 approximately 900 Jews still lived in Gliwice. With the exception of those who lived in so-called »Mischehen« (mixed marriages), the Gliwice Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942/43, where most of them were murdered upon arrival. In 1944 several satellite camps of the Auschwitz camp complex were set up in and around Gliwice. Most of the prisoners who had to conduct forced labour in these camps were murdered in January 1945.

Gliwice, 2019, Exhibit in the permanent exhibition, Dom Pamięci Żydów Górnośląskich

Victims

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, about 1,800 Jews lived in Gliwice, which at that time had about 110,000 inhabitants in total. Until 1939 about half of the Jewish inhabitants emigrated. At the end of 1940, when the emigration routes were already blocked, 692 Jews were statistically recorded in Gliwice. Most of them were deported in 1942/43 in various transports to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and murdered there. Only 25 Jewish persons living in so-called »Mischehen« (mixed marriages) survived the Holocaust in Gliwice.

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

Since 1945 Gliwice is a Polish city. Most Germans who had lived there fled or were expelled. In the immediate post-war period about 1,000 Jews lived in Gliwice, most of them Holocaust survivors from formerly Polish territories. Until 1950, most of them left the city again but a small Jewish community with its own house of prayer continued to exist.
Inaugurated in 1861, the New Synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis on November 9, 1938. On its former site, two commemorative plaques were unveiled in 2003.
The Jewish cemetery still exists today, despite plans in the 1970s to release the site for new housing projects. Also many old gravestones are still preserved. Immediately after the Second World War all German inscriptions were to be destroyed but this eventually was prevented by the Jewish community.
In the burial hall of the Jewish cemetery, built in 1903, the House of Remembrance of the Jews of Upper Silesia opened in 2019 as a branch of the Gliwice Museum. The neo-Gothic building designed by the Viennese architect Max Fleischer (1841-1905) had previously been restored at the initiative of the city officials. On 150 square metres, the permanent exhibition tells the story of the Jews of Upper Silesia, especially in the period between 1800 and 1945.

Gliwice, 2019, Entrance hall of the funeral hall, Dom Pamięci Żydów Górnośląskich

Gliwice, 1900, The picture postcard (about 1900) shows the grandparent’s wine shop of the family of Oscar Troplowitz (1863-1918), the inventor of NIVEA creme, public domain

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, changing exhibitions, seminar room

Open

Tuesday to Friday 10.00 am to 4.00 pm, Saturday 11.00 am to 5.00 pm, Sunday 10.00 am to 3.00 pm

Contact

http://muzeum.gliwice.pl

info@muzeum.gliwice.pl

+48 (0) 32 428 16 09

ul. Księcia Józefa Poniatowskiego 14
44–100 Gliwice

Gliwice, 1903, Postcard from the then newly opened ceremonial hall of the Jewish cemetery, Dom Pamięci Żydów Górnośląskich

Gliwice, about 1900, The New Synagogue on Niederwallstrasse, destroyed in 1938, public domain

Gliwice, 2007, Commemorative plaque at the former site of the New Synagogue, Tomasz Górny

Gliwice, 2012, Jewish cemetery, Tomasz Górny

Gliwice, 2019, Exterior view of the funeral hall, Dom Pamięci Żydów Górnośląskich

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