The Warsaw Ghetto Museum invites you to watch the seventh 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.
The wall ran through Muranowska Street, so the ghetto was already on the other side, and I often looked at the house opposite, but there was no one in sight behind the curtains. Only occasionally did I see a bottle of milk in the window , says Andrzej Korzon, born January 10, 1932, in Warsaw. " Then I learned that Jews weren't allowed to approach the window. And on Muranowska Street itself, there was little traffic on that side, so I couldn't see much. And when the ghetto uprising broke out, my mother took me to the countryside to visit her friend, in Dąbrowa Zduńska near Łowicz, so I didn't see the uprising either. Once I saw some goods being thrown in sacks from our gate at 2 Muranowska Street to the other side of the wall. There was a house under the pillars, which was still partially standing in the 1970s, only slightly demolished, and a guy would run out from under the pillars and throw a sack to the other side every few minutes. Apparently, there were guards there. Besides, I once heard my mother say that a tunnel leading to the ghetto had been discovered a few houses away from one of the houses. This is consistent with what Jan Karski wrote in his memoirs, that he went from Muranowska Street to the ghetto to see what was going on there, and he saw incomparably more than I did.
