Varsavianist walk | Inselbergs in the Small Ghetto

The southern part of the Warsaw Ghetto, the so-called small ghetto, was almost completely excluded from the closed district in the summer of 1942 after the Great Liquidation Action. In this area there are still inselbergs – pre-war buildings that became witnesses and participants of the ghetto life. These decaying buildings are often reminiscent of pre-war Jewish Warsaw. In the area of the former small ghetto we can also find the preserved walls of the closed Jewish quarter, old streets, the course of which changed a little after the war.

Walking through the small ghetto we will find such islands of memory and listen to their stories about the times of war and the Holocaust, but also about pre-war Warsaw. Some of the buildings preserved in the neighbourhood are in poor condition and their fate is uncertain – the area of the ghetto is undergoing dynamic modernization.

What will we see during the walk?

• several fragments of the preserved ghetto walls, including one that is unmarked but survived the war;
• the former Bersohns and Baumans hospital for children, which was constantly working in the ghetto and to which the children from the closed district were sent;
• new architectural solutions using inselbergs from the area of the former ghetto;
• the fragment of the synagogue of Icchak Meir Alter, a tzaddik from Góra Kalwaria, which was located on the outskirts of the ghetto during the war;
• the famous tenement building ‘under the sailing ship’ on Sienna Street;
• the building that housed the ghetto’s only legally operating university;
• the flat building where the composer Mieczysław Wajnberg was born and lived before the war;
• one of the newest murals dedicated to Jewish Warsaw – at the back of a pre-war tenement building;

and many other interesting places.

The walk will be led by Masha Makarova of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum’s Education Department. She is a historian, anthropologist and a city guide, writing a doctoral thesis on Jewish emigration to Birobidzhan and dealing with issues of memory and politics of history. She runs a blog @warsaw.to.remember on Instagram.

When – January 23 (Sunday), 12:00
Where – at the Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital (51 Śliska Street).

The walk will last about 2,5 hours. Participation in the event is free of charge.