In the Polish small-town of Warta, the majority of the inhabitants were once Jewish. Almost all of them were murdered in the Holocaust. Today, the Jewish cemetery is a reminder of their eradicated culture.
History
The town of Warta, situated on the river of the same name about 50 km west of Łódź in central Poland, had its heyday in the Middle Ages. Before the First World War the town belonged to the Russian Empire. Warta remained economically insignificant even after the First World War. Slightly more than half of the almost 5,000 inhabitants were Jews, most of whom lived off the crafts and trades.
Warta was close to Poland's western border, so that the town was captured by the Wehrmacht only a few days after the German attack. Large parts of the town as well as the synagogue were destroyed during the fighting. From the very beginning, Jews especially suffered under the occupation: Already in the first days German soldiers harassed Jews and cut off their sidecurls. Well-known photos, probably taken during these days, show the humiliation of rabbi Eliasz Laskowski and his son Hersz.
The town was soon assigned to the »Reichsgau Wartheland« and integrated into the German Reich. Jews had to conduct forced labour, make special payments and wear a »Judenstern« (yellow star badge) for identification.
In February 1940, the German authorities set up a ghetto in Warta to which all Jews had to move. These houses there were virtually uninhabitable. From 1941 many Jews were deported to forced labour camps. Only a few were allowed to work in the ghetto, so living conditions continued to deteriorate. On April 14, 1942 ten Jewish men from the ghetto were publicly hanged near the ruins of the synagogue. Among those murdered were Eliasz and Hersz Laskowski. The ghetto was finally dissolved on July 24 and 25, 1942. About 400 Jews considered fit for work were transferred to the Łódź Ghetto. All others were first imprisoned in a church. Three days later they were taken to the nearby extermination camp Chełmno where they were murdered with engine exhaust fumes.
Victims
Prior to WWII an estimated 2,000 Jews lived in Warta. Most of them died because of the miserable living conditions in the ghetto, perished in forced labour camps or were murdered in the Chełmno extermination camp. Only a few Jews from Warta survived the Holocaust.
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
After the war only a few Jews returned to Warta. On December 13, 1945 local ethnic Poles murdered two Jews in broad daylight, whereupon all Jews left the town the next day. Since then no Jews have lived in Warta.
For decades nobody took care of the still existing traces of former Jewish life. The area of the old Jewish cemetery, completely destroyed during the German occupation, was built on. In the 1980s, a single citizen, Ireneusz Ślipek (1935-2006), began to maintain the abandoned new Jewish cemetery. He brought Jewish gravestones back to the cemetery and tried to reassemble broken gravestones. Until his death he re-erected a total of more than 1,000 gravestones. Today, an association bearing Ślipek’s name takes care of the preservation of the cemetery. There are also the graves of the two Jews who were murdered in December 1945, but also a memorial stone for the ten Jewish men hanged in April 1942. On the outer wall of the post office building, which was built on the site of the former synagogue, a plaque remembers the ten Jewish men hanged there in 1942.
Contact
stowarzyszenieireneuszaslipka@gmail.com
+48 (0)602 248 913
ul. Sadowa/ul. Kazimierza Deczyńskiego
98-290 Warta
