In 1965, the Pawiak Prison Museum was opened. It commemorates the approximately 100,000 people to be incarcerated at the Pawiak Prison under German occupation 1939 to 1944.
History
Warsaw's Pawiak Prison was constructed between 1830 and 1835. At the time, this region of Poland was part of the Russian Empire. When Poland regained its independence after World War I, Pawiak - named after the street it was located on - was used as a remand prison. After the German invasion of Poland and the occupation of Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, it became the central Gestapo prison in Warsaw. The Pawiak Prison was under the control of the commander of the German security police and security service; the prison guards were members of the SS and the Ukrainian auxiliary police. Although the prison was located in the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto, which was established in 1940, most of the inmates were non-Jewish Poles from Warsaw and the rest of the General Government, including resistance fighters and members of the Polish intelligentsia. Next to the men's prison there was also a section for women known under the name of »Serbia«.
The Pawiak Prison was infamous for the brutal treatment of prisoners. Many of the 100,000 prisoners to pass through Pawiak between 1939 and 1944 were shot after being arrested or tortured to death. About 60,000 prisoners were deported to other prisons or concentration camps. During the Warsaw Uprising (August to October 1944), the SS dismantled the prison: On August 21, 1944, members of the SS murdered the remaining prisoners and blew up the prison building.
Victims
Up to 100,000 people passed through the Pawiak Gestapo Prison in Warsaw under German occupation. Many of these Polish political prisoners were deported to other prisons or concentration camps. At least 32,000 people were murdered during their incarceration at the Pawiak Prison. Only a few thousand inmates survived imprisonment.
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
In 1965, a one-storey building was erected on the site of the demolished prison. It has since then housed the prison museum. There are still some remains of prison buildings on the premises as well as numerous monuments. A tree also honours the victims: After the war, victims' relatives affixed memorial plaques to an elm. When the tree died, a bronze replica was erected on the site.
The Pawiak Prison is of great symbolic importance to Poles as one of the central sites of persecution of political prisoners; in 1983, the Polish pope John Paul II visited the memorial during his visit to Poland. The museum has been a branch of the Warsaw Museum of Independence since 1990.
On the opposite side of the Aleja Jana Pawła II, there is a memorial stone dedicated to the victims of the women's prison »Serbia«.
Open
Wednesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Closed on Monday and Tuesday
