The Warsaw Ghetto Museum invites you to the tenth and final 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 memory of (…) these children will never allow me to be an anti-Semite ,” says Barbara Gimpel, née Skoczylas, born in 1934, who has lived in Warsaw “practically since birth.” "... on the left side, at 12 on Elektoralna Street, lived my friend, Ewunia Dmochowska. Her parents ran a toy wholesaler. They were a very, very nice family, very kind. Her mother played the piano for us. There was such a warm, very cordial atmosphere in that house. And it was right across from us, I don't know if it was on the second or first floor, across from us, that we established a relationship with a girl in the ghetto. She showed us dolls... Because the street wasn't that wide. It seemed wide to us then, but now... She showed us dolls and we showed her dolls. And since I'm on the subject of the ghetto, there was also a shocking image for me, but I've seen it somewhere else. Also here, in this area, because I didn't go far with my mother, but I saw that under the ghetto wall there were these small holes, as if for drainage, so tiny, and two children came out through these two holes. Sticks, such Terribly thin. And I looked at it like this… how could children look like that? And my mother took me away from there quickly, because we weren't allowed to approach the walls. I don't know what happened to those children. But it's also a memory that lingers, and this memory of that occupation, of those children, will never allow me to be an anti-Semite.
