Warsaw: The Ghetto That Took Up Arms

You are in Warsaw's Old Town Market Square. Look at the colorful houses with their painted facades, the steep roofs, the mermaid with sword and shield in the middle. It all looks four hundred years old. But almost nothing you see is more than seventy. In 1944, after the people of Warsaw rose against the occupation, Hitler ordered the city razed. The Germans dynamited it building by building. By the end of the war, most of Warsaw was a field of rubble. After 1945, the Poles decided to rebuild the historic center exactly as it had been. They used photographs, plans, drawings by architecture s…

You are at the foot of the Palace of Culture and Science, the giant Soviet-style tower that dominates Warsaw. It is more than two hundred and thirty meters tall. It was built between 1952 and 1955. It was Stalin's gift to the Polish people. A gift no one had asked for. It went up on flattened ground. Whole blocks of houses, shops and streets once stood here. The war had turned them to dust. Communist reconstruction finished erasing them. The people of Warsaw have a joke: the best view of Warsaw is from the top of the palace. Because it is the only place in the city from which you cannot see…

You are in a courtyard between Złota and Sienna Streets. Look at the red brick wall, about three meters high. It is one of the few surviving fragments of the Warsaw Ghetto wall. In November 1940, the Germans sealed the ghetto. They shut more than four hundred thousand Jews into an area of about three square kilometers. A third of the city's population in a small fraction of its surface. The wall was about eighteen kilometers long. On top, barbed wire and broken glass. The Jews themselves had to pay for it. Official food rations for Jews were a few hundred calories a day. A fraction of what …

You are facing the Nożyk Synagogue. Look at the classical front, with columns and a pediment. It opened in 1902, funded by a merchant couple, the Nożyks. Before the war, Warsaw had hundreds of synagogues and prayer houses. This is the only prewar one still standing and in use. It ended up inside the ghetto. The Germans used it as a warehouse and a stable for horses. That is why they did not blow it up. The Great Synagogue of Warsaw, much bigger, stood a few blocks away. The Germans dynamited it on 16 May 1943, as the symbolic finale to crushing the uprising. The officer in charge, Jürgen S…

You are on Chłodna Street. Look at the two metal posts on either side of the street, joined by cables that light up at night. They mark where a bridge once stood. The ghetto was split in two: the small ghetto to the south and the large ghetto to the north. This street ran between them. It belonged to the Aryan city, with trams and Polish pedestrians. So that Jews could cross from one ghetto to the other without setting foot on the street, the Germans built a wooden footbridge above it in 1942. Thousands of people crossed that bridge every day, crammed together, looking down at the other cit…

You are outside the Pawiak Prison Museum. Look to one side at a bronze tree covered in small plaques bearing names. It is a copy of an elm that stood here, in the prison yard. Pawiak was a nineteenth-century prison. During the occupation, the Gestapo made it its main detention center in Warsaw. It ended up inside the ghetto. About a hundred thousand people passed through here. Members of the Polish resistance, intellectuals, Jews caught on the Aryan side, hostages. Tens of thousands were shot or sent to concentration camps. The old elm survived the war, dried out. After 1945, victims' relat…

You are on Nowolipki Street. Here, in the basement of a school that no longer exists, one of the most important treasures of the twentieth century was buried. A historian named Emanuel Ringelblum organized a secret group in the ghetto. It was called Oneg Shabbat, the joy of the Sabbath, to throw people off the scent. Its mission was to document everything. Personal diaries, photos, poems, children's drawings, tram tickets, soup kitchen menus, reports on the hunger and the deportations. They knew they were going to die. They wanted the world to know exactly what had happened, told by the vic…

You are facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. Look at the bronze relief: armed men, women and children, fists clenched, emerging from the fire. On the other side, a procession of stooped figures walks toward death. It was unveiled in 1948, among the ruins. Everything around was rubble. It was made by the sculptor Nathan Rapoport. Between July and September 1942, the Germans deported some two hundred and sixty thousand people from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. Some fifty or sixty thousand remained. Those who remained understood there was no future. The young organized. …

You are facing the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Look at the greenish glass building. In the facade there is a large wavy opening, like a crack running right through it. The shape recalls the parting of the Red Sea. Also a wound. Both readings hold. Polin means Poland in Hebrew. According to legend, Jews fleeing persecution in western Europe arrived here and heard a voice saying: po lin, rest here. The museum does not tell six years of war. It tells a thousand years of history. For centuries, Poland was home to more Jews than anywhere else in the world. Villages, cities, polit…

You are facing a small grass-covered mound with a stone on top. It looks like a little hill in the middle of a district of apartment blocks. It is a grave. Here, at number 18 Miła Street, there was an underground bunker. Ghetto smugglers had built it. In the last weeks of the uprising, it became the headquarters of the Jewish Fighting Organization. More than a hundred people were hiding inside. Fighters, civilians, the commander Mordechai Anielewicz and his partner, Mira Fuchrer. On 8 May 1943, the Germans discovered the entrance. They threw gas into the openings to force them out. Most ch…

You are at the Umschlagplatz, on Stawki Street. Look at the white marble monument: an open enclosure, like a freight car. Hundreds of names are carved into its walls. Notice they are first names only. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rachel. No surnames. They stand for everyone. This was a loading yard beside the railway. During the summer of 1942, thousands of people were gathered here every day. They were packed into cattle cars, more than a hundred per car. Destination: Treblinka, a hundred kilometers away. Almost no one came back. At first, the Germans said they were being resettled in the east t…

You have entered the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street. Walk among the headstones, many of them leaning and covered in moss, with trees growing between the graves. There are more than two hundred thousand. This cemetery lay inside the ghetto, but it survived almost intact. It is one of the few places where you can still see the scale of the world that existed. Ludwik Zamenhof is buried here, creator of Esperanto, a language designed so that peoples could understand one another. So is Adam Czerniaków, the head of the Jewish council who refused to sign. Look also for a stone monument showing …