The Warsaw Ghetto Museum invites you to watch the eighth film in the "There Was a Wall" series. November 16th marks the 80th anniversary of the closing of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Warsaw Ghetto Museum, in cooperation with the Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and with the support of its patrons, commemorates this date. The anniversary events are accompanied by the "There Was a Wall" social campaign, under the honorary patronage of the Mayor of Warsaw. The film excerpts selected by the Research Department of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and published here are part of the Oral History Archive of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, which shares them with us as part of the collaboration between our institutions.
Conversations with civilians from Warsaw and Home Army veterans bring us closer to the time when Warsaw's residents were divided by the Wall in the autumn of 1940. The final sealing of the Warsaw Ghetto borders took place on November 16, 1940.
" I saw the ghetto wall ," says Wanda Kierzkowska, née Marynowska, born in Warsaw in 1936. " I had a friend, Sewek . [My] father, when they were going to the ghetto, asked [his] parents... Because I was friends with Sewek, because I had a sister—my sister is dead, she was a year and a half older than me—and Sewek and I were very close friends, we played together, we lived next door to each other. When they were going to the ghetto, my father asked us to hide Sewek, but his parents didn't agree. They said they wouldn't be separated from their family, from their children ."
