The ghetto wall appeared very quickly in Warsaw, and quickly disappeared from it as well. Today, we are reconstructing its image based on traces: a few remnants of fragments, photographs and film footage, as well as commemorations in dozens of locations around the city.
Photographs of the wall separating the Warsaw Ghetto from the so-called Aryan side, held in the collection of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, depict street views and city buildings with a clearly marked spatial division. The wall cuts across streets, divides entire building frontages, and interrupts traffic routes and the urban fabric (Fig. 1). Taken primarily by German soldiers arriving in the city, as evidenced by inscriptions on the backs, the photographs serve as a reminder not only of the ghetto's existence and location. Above all, they highlight the fact that Warsaw's Jewish community was isolated from the rest of society, excluded from the city's functioning, brutally separated, and confined behind the wall.
Closing of the ghetto
On the night of November 15-16, 1940, the occupation authorities implemented the October 2nd decree issued by Warsaw District Governor Ludwig Fischer to close the Warsaw Ghetto. Emanuel Ringelblum, founder of the underground Warsaw Ghetto archive, wrote:
The Sabbath day on which the ghetto was established (November 16th) was a terrible one. The population didn't yet know that the ghetto would be closed, so the news came like a bolt of lightning. German, Polish, and Jewish policemen were posted at every intersection, checking who was allowed to pass. It turned out that the market halls were closed to Jewish women. Bread and other products immediately ran out. Since then, a veritable orgy of high prices has raged."
The closure of the ghetto came as a surprise, even though the Jewish community had long feared the changes, signaled by the ephemeral barbed-wire fences that had appeared throughout Warsaw since November 1939 to initially mark areas inhabited primarily by Jews. According to the occupation authorities' decree, these fences were to be replaced by a wall, erected from April 1, 1940, at the expense and with the help of the Jewish community, and whose construction was the responsibility of the Judenrat – the Jewish Council of Elders. Initially, however, the ultimate purpose of the wall was unclear; it was unclear whether the Jewish quarter would be permanently closed or whether contacts between the ghetto and the rest of the city would be possible. As Ringelblum wrote:
The occupation authorities' plans were kept secret. No one knew whether the ghetto would be open, so that Christians and Jews could communicate, or closed, like in Łódź, where residents had been condemned to starvation and epidemics for months. Or perhaps—who knows, perhaps all this was just to force contributions from the Jewish population?
The decree of March 27, 1940, justified the need to build the wall by citing the threat of epidemics. The belief in the need to separate the so-called Seuchensperrgebiet, the "area affected by the epidemic," was widespread, and the city's residents were fearful of contracting typhus. A photograph from the collections of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum (fig. 2), showing a section of the wall separating Piwna Street, bears the annotation "Seuchenmauer," or "wall against the plague," on the reverse. It also illustrates the anti-Semitic stereotype disseminated by the Nazis, which associated Jewish districts with poor sanitary conditions and, consequently, the spread of disease. The goal was to introduce social division, a mental barrier built on fear and prejudice. Meanwhile, messages directed at the Jewish community were intended to reassure them that the wall would serve their protection and, among other things, help curb anti-Semitic incidents and attacks. The more suspicious distrusted these assurances and predicted a threat. "They began to build walls around the plague area. It made a strong impression. They see this as the beginning of a de facto ghetto," Emanuel Ringelblum noted in his wartime diary.
Wall
A wall topped with barbed wire, 3 meters high and initially 18 kilometers long, demarcated the area designated for the ghetto, inhabited primarily by Jews, between Złota and Stawki Streets, from Wronia Street almost to the New Town Market Square. In June, the wall surrounded an area of only 307 hectares, containing 1483 houses. By October, after the official announcement of the ghetto's creation, 113 Poles were expelled and 138 people of Jewish origin were resettled. Their number steadily increased, reaching approximately 450 in April 1941, following the resettlement of Jews from surrounding towns and from the Third Reich.
In her text, "The Warsaw Ghetto Wall as an Axis of the Space of Life and Death," from the book "Black Gloomy Walls... Historical Essays on the Warsaw Ghetto," edited by Martyna Grądzka-Rejak and Konrad Zieliński and soon to be published by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, Eleonora Jedlińska highlights the social significance of the wall. Drawing on witness accounts, memoirs, and documents, she writes about the wall's role in individual experiences of the Holocaust:
"The fence, the barbed wire, the brick wall; the wall that separates, isolates, encloses, bristling with broken glass, interrupted by a gate guarded by armed guards, became the leitmotif of the stories of those who survived and at the same time the image-idiom of the Holocaust."
Ringelblum also expressed existential concerns about the wall, noting: "The walls that have already been built on Rymarska Street have been made higher; they give the impression of real prison walls. They want to wall us in alive, that's what people think."
Wall paintings
The wall is a powerful motif that carries the tension of its clear symbolism, yet its real presence in urban space and social life, and its consequences. It appears not only in the aforementioned written sources but also in literature and visual arts. The wall, seen and experienced daily, became the subject of witnesses' works, including Mieczysław Wejman's 1944 series of prints "Dancing," which were carefully analyzed by Piotr Rypson and Luiza Nader. Known indirectly, for example from photographs, the wall permeated paintings created in the postwar years, as Piotr Słodkowski demonstrates using the examples of Witold Miller's socialist realist composition "Help for the People's Guard" from 1953 and the famous photograph from Taffet's album "The Destruction of Polish Jewry" (1945). Images of the wall also recurred in subsequent decades of postwar cinema. Both Jedlińska in the cited text and Bartosz Kwieciński in an essay published in the same volume recall images from Polański's "The Pianist" (2002), created on the basis of descriptions from Szpilman's "Diaries" published just after the war:
"However, the streets of the ghetto led nowhere. They always ended in a wall. Often, I would walk forward only to unexpectedly encounter a wall. It suddenly blocked my path, and even if I had wanted to continue my journey, there was no logical explanation why it shouldn't be possible. The rest of the street, on the other side of the wall, grew within me into something I couldn't give up, something most precious on earth, something happening there that I would give everything I possess to experience."
The photographs of the wall from the collection of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, even if this was not the intention of their German authors, reveal the absurd and poignant divisions Szpilman described in his daily experience. These are images of a brutally divided city: they reveal interrupted streets, unexpected views of the wall rising directly before passersby. These photographs are most often taken from the outside, so they usually depict a deserted city, devoid of its inhabitants. Their drama can be surmised from the traces, where the former course of the wall is visible (Fig. 3). They recall the history of the gradual shifting of the ghetto's borders, the narrowing of its area, which each time drastically worsened the unimaginably difficult living conditions of the Jewish population behind the wall.
Remains of the wall and the memory of the wall
Few fragments of the wall remain in Warsaw, and its dismantling began very quickly – some sections were removed as early as 1942 and 1943, after the liquidation of the ghetto. Today, in addition to a dozen or so fragments of the wall's material remains, traces of it can be found throughout the city. Between 2008 and 2010, the wall's course was marked on sidewalks with concrete strips bearing a bilingual cast-iron inscription reading "Ghetto Wall 1940/Ghetto Wall 1943." These are accompanied by plaques with maps of the ghetto and information about specific commemorative sites and their significance. Marking these locations within the topography of contemporary Warsaw, which is sometimes difficult to superimpose images of the divided city during the war, allows contemporary viewers to mentally reconstruct the area of the Warsaw Ghetto.
