We are sharing a column by Professor Konrad Zieliński from the Scientific and Research Department of the Warsaw Ghetto University, published in the Plus Minus magazine – the weekend edition of Rzeczpospolita – on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the closing of the Warsaw Ghetto borders.
20th November,
On January 17, 1945, when Red Army and First Polish Army units occupied successive quarters of ruined and depopulated Warsaw, the area of the former ghetto resembled a stone desert with the Church of St. Augustine at its center. The Germans intended to blow up the church, but their plan was never carried out, and the church, towering over the razed ghetto area, was likely a visible sign of God's providence for some.
The proximity of the miraculously preserved church did not hinder those digging through the rubble for valuables and other usable items. The Warsaw press frequently reported on diggers caught red-handed and fences handling items excavated on Nowolipki Street, on Gęsia Street, in the Pawiak prison grounds, and at the sites of public executions. The area "behind the wall," even though the ghetto wall had been physically dismantled in many places, was still viewed as a kind of Eldorado. This was similar before the beginning of the so-called Grossaktion, when many Jews traded their most valuable possessions for a loaf of bread or a sack of potatoes.
New Muranów
The photograph of the church with its surrounding ruins is today one of the most moving symbols of the city's destruction, highlighting the scale of its destruction and creating a rather eerie impression. This impression is intensified when we realize that just a few years earlier, this small area housed several hundred thousand people, most of whom were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp. To this day, workers conducting earthworks and construction work in the former ghetto area continue to find fire-twisted glass bottles, metal elements, tiles, charred paper and wood, as well as human bones. In Muranów, no systematic exhumation work was ever carried out, and most of the rubble was not removed, but merely leveled.
After the war, new buildings were erected within the ghetto, some streets were rerouted, and the few remaining traces of the earlier buildings were effectively removed. Bohdan Lachert conceived the new Muranów, constructed of rubble concrete made on site and featuring unplastered brick houses, to evoke the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto and commemorate the capital's Jewish residents. Over time, the architect's intention was abandoned, the blocks were plastered, and numerous socialist realist elements were added. Muranów became a symbol of the absence of Warsaw's Jews. Monuments and commemorative plaques, based on the monumental Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, were intended to commemorate the war and the fate of the ghetto's inhabitants.
Monument and politics
Not everyone realizes that the monument, designed by Natan Rapoport and Leon Suzin, alludes in its composition to preserved fragments of the Jerusalem Temple wall and, more precisely, to the walls of the ghetto. The monument was erected in 1948, but the first plaque, surrounded by red sandstone and bearing an inscription in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish, was unveiled two years earlier, on the third anniversary of the outbreak of the ghetto uprising. A Polish Film Chronicle from 1946 shows snapshots of the ceremony: in freezing rain, in silence, official delegations, groups of young people, and a few residents make their way through ravines heaped with ruins.
Both monuments were visited in August 1948 by participants of the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wrocław. The ruins and emptiness left by the hundreds of thousands gassed in the Treblinka extermination camp were intended to reinforce the Congress's message. After all, the memory of the war was still fresh, and two years earlier—not without significance—Wilhelm Churchill's speech in Fulton had mentioned the "Iron Curtain." The visit of these world-renowned creators and thinkers should be fully utilized in the escalating Cold War.
In subsequent years, flowers were laid quite regularly at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, and it was visited by delegations from primarily Jewish organizations and official Israeli representatives (but only until 1967, when Poland severed diplomatic relations with Israel due to the Six-Day War). Foreign delegations, unless they expressed a desire to lay flowers at Zamenhof, were not sent specifically to Muranów. It is therefore not surprising that Willy Brandt's intention to lay a wreath at the Monument (in 1970, the Chancellor flew to Warsaw to sign an agreement normalizing relations between Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany) became a source of misunderstanding with the Polish authorities. They demanded that the wreath Brandt laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier be larger than the one at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes...
The now-iconic photograph of the kneeling Chancellor circulated worldwide, but in Poland, apart from Fołks Sztyme, no newspaper published it in such a way as to make it clear which monument it was taking place in front of. Two years after the Zionist smear campaign, there was no need to overemphasize the suffering and sacrifices of the Jewish people, although Brandt's gesture from 50 years ago was intended to pay tribute to all the victims of the war unleashed by Germany against Poland. Moreover, this gesture was also received with some reserve in Germany. Germany in the 70s was still far from coming to terms with its history…
Memory restored (?)
Since the political transformation in Poland, a visit to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes has been on the agenda of many foreign delegations: in 1994, Bill Clinton paid tribute to the heroes and victims of the ghetto, and in 2011, Barack Obama. It is regularly visited by tourists from around the world, groups of young people and soldiers from Israel, and school trips. It seems that, along with the POLIN Museum, it has become a "must-see" for foreign tourists visiting Warsaw.
The monument is the most famous, albeit symbolic, representation of the ghetto wall. Traces of it can also be found along the Jewish Martyrdom and Struggle Memorial Route, at the Umschlagplatz, on Sienna and Złota Streets, and at the intersection of Chłodna and Żelazna Streets, an art installation symbolically commemorating the footbridge connecting the two parts of the ghetto. The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is being built in the former children's hospital on Sienna and Śliska Streets, located within the so-called small ghetto. It will be the most important place commemorating the life and death of Warsaw Jews. Daffodils distributed to passersby on the anniversary of the outbreak of the ghetto uprising prove that Warsaw, not just the "official" one, remembers. Similar sentiments are evoked by the success of Roman Polański's The Pianist and the popularity of Szczepan Twardoch's prose, whose characters live in the capital and hide in its ruins. We can never be too reminded of this tragedy.
Prof. Konrad Zieliński
The author is a full professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin and an employee of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
Photo: public domain
