85th anniversary of the closure of the Warsaw Ghetto

On 16 November 1940, by order of the Governor of the Warsaw District, Ludwig Fischer, the borders of the ghetto were closed. Jewish Warsaw was surrounded by a wall. The community of Warsaw Jews, full of contrasts but also colourful and dynamic, was separated from the rest of the city.

Before the war, 368,000 Jews lived in Warsaw, accounting for about 30% of the population of the Polish capital. It was the largest Jewish community in Europe. At the beginning of the war, many Jews left Warsaw, fleeing to the east, but in the following months of occupation, nearly 90,000 Jews were displaced from other towns, mainly from Polish territories incorporated into the Reich. In December 1940, there were 395,000 people in the ghetto. Soon, as a result of further resettlements, including from towns near Warsaw, this number rose to 450,000. They were crammed into an area of approximately 4 km2.

“We went to sleep in the Jewish quarter, and the next morning we woke up in a closed Jewish ghetto – a ghetto in the full sense of the word,” Chaim Kapłan noted in his diary. The construction of the three-metre wall had to be financed by the Jewish community itself. There were 22 guarded gates leading to the ghetto, which could only be crossed with the appropriate permit. Violating this rule was punishable by a fine and, over time, even the death penalty.

The closure of the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940 marked the beginning of the extermination of several hundred thousand Jews imprisoned behind its walls.
As every year, the Warsaw Ghetto Museum will commemorate the ‘city behind the wall’ and its inhabitants.