The Warsaw Ghetto Museum invites you to the sixth 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 remember very well, when we lived on Chłodna Street, the ghetto was surrounded by this wooden fence, and these Jewish children could get through it quite easily ," says Jacek Czajewski, born in Warsaw in 1936. " They would be helped, jump over, and simply go begging, collecting food. Returning, they had an appointment, they would call their parents or someone, throw these bags of food, and enter in a special way: namely, the parents or elders would stick their hands between the fence boards, which formed rungs, and that's how the children would get in. Later, they built... they replaced that fence with a wall with glass on top, and getting through, especially back, was practically impossible, and these children would go through unbuilt gutters because the gutters were left clear to allow water to flow through." Later, I remember there was a moment when, at the corner of Elektoralna Street, more or less, and Chłodna Street, a German guard was keeping watch, a watchman who liked to shoot himself, and at that very moment, the fence was being removed, even though the wall hadn't been built yet. So there was a space of a few or a dozen meters, a clear space, and from there, the Germans were keeping watch. Not a day went by without this German shooting someone in the ghetto. He simply shot like a hunter at a hare.
