The Warsaw Ghetto Museum invites you to the fifth film in the "There Was a Wall" series. November 16th marks 80 years since 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 the period when they started building the ghetto, that is, the ghetto wall ," says Leszek Rościszewski, born in Kołomyja in 1936. " My aunt and I often went to the ghetto wall. We would throw food to the Jews, because they were really hungry all the time. Besides, during that period, they would walk through the sewers and come to the people living [on the other side of the wall] for food, to give them something. People would give them their last bread and whatever they had [to eat]. But the only unpleasant thing was that when a German caught a Jew, that Jew would give it all away out of fear. "
