Warsaw ghetto

My wanderings in the Polish capital at the beginning of July 2010 ended up taking me to the former ghetto area. In a large square near Zamenhof street, surrounded by communist blocks erected on the rubble piles of the old Jewish houses, we can see the colossal monument dedicated to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, designed by the sculptor Nathan Rappaport and inaugurated in the 1980s by the communist authorities.

 
In the spring of 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was brutally suppressed by the Nazi army, who slaughtered more than 13,000 Jews during the successful operation of annihilation of that part of the town. Most of the 50,000 remaining Jews were captured and shipped to the unimaginable extermination camp of Treblinka.

Some say that, ironically, the material used by the sculptor has previously been commissioned by the Nazis in order to build a monument to the expected German victory.

 
A few meters from the tragic memorial, behind fences, we can see the ongoing construction of the ambitious Museum of the History of Polish Jews, due to open its doors in 2012.

 
In the square that houses Rappaport's colossus, dotted by small black marble monuments around adjacent streets and celebrating, in Polish and Hebrew, different personalities, places and moments of this macabre story, older people sat quietly on benches under the weekend sunshine, while residents of the neighborhood  walked their dogs over the buried rubble, amidst ghosts whose piercing screams guided my steps.

Umschlagplatz

My family has no roots in Poland, but that is irrelevant when you touch the ground of Warsaw. I feel beneath the feet as the land is buzzing, echoing all those steps and tumbles of those who were victims and instruments of the horror of war.

For a moment I ask myself why I should remember this past which is not mine and has no direct connection to myself, whether it would not be better to focus energy towards a future in which such monstrosities should not happen anymore, but the question crumbles and I walk further, stunned by the former ghetto area [whose boundaries are marked today on the sidewalk, as the picture shows], not understanding what I seek, sure that I will never be able to understand the depth of suffering and the scale of carnage that the monuments evoke.

One of these monuments marks the place of Umschlagplatz where, especially during the summer of 1942, the Nazis gathered about 300,000 Polish Jews to be deported by train directly to the death chambers of Treblinka.

Erected in 1988, the marble monument, which suggests a rectangular wagon, has a long wall on which are inscribed various Jewish surnames from A to Z. In it, a slit large enough to attract attention, but narrow enough not to allow the passage of anyone. I watched through it with a fearful prudence of someone who watches the hell, and what you see is a large tree planted exactly in its direction - unexpected refreshment for a difficult hope.

Warsaw ghosts

Walking in Warsaw is a strange exercise. I can only imagine to be walking over rubble, recalling the destruction wrought by the German army in 1944 after choking the Warsaw Uprising. At the behest of Hitler, the ruthless Verbrennungs-und Vernichtungskommando reduced almost the whole city to ruins.

Today, the picturesque old town of Warsaw is a formidable reconstruction made by the Polish Communist government in the 50s of the last century, mainly based on paintings by the Venetian Bernardo Bellotto, Polish court painter since 1764, who drew it rather for the sake of aesthetics than urban fidelity.

  Even if I wanted to dodge the ghosts of the city, they challenge me at every corner with a monument or a plaque, which leads the visitor to the recent and cruel past of World War II: the German invasion, the 1940 boundaries of the ghetto, the Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, the subsequent destruction brought by the Nazi and the Soviet invasion.

The city, however, floats at the lush sound of Chopin, the bicentenary of whose birth is celebrated this year as if nothing of that had happened. The silent granite and bronze monuments record the torturing memory of the past. The whole city, with all its circulating life, is a compelling symbol of the will of the Polish people. But walking through its streets and bypassing long lines to buy ice cream, I alternate between praising such a pride and collapsing in tears, because I know that I move in the space of a former slaughterhouse.

Warsaw: Jewish cemetery

In early July 2010, I had the opportunity to visit the Jewish cemetery at the Okopowa street in Warsaw. According to information available in the cemetery itself, it was at the end of the 14th century that Jews began coming to town. Not allowed to live there between 1527 and 1795, they began in mid-eighteenth century to settle in large numbers on the outskirts of Warsaw. The local Jewish community established their own cemetery in 1806. Until 1939, 150 000 burials had been performed in this cemetery, covering an area of 33.4 hectares.

 
In line with the torturous history of that city, the cemetery has, in addition to numerous monuments dedicated to victims of the Holocaust, a huge mass grave with those who perished in the Warsaw ghetto and an area full of symbolic tombs erected by relatives of Holocaust victims who have never been localized.

One of the most famous personalities buried there is Lazar Ludwik Zamenhof (1859-1917) - his tomb was the first to draw my attention with its impressive mosaic representing the green star, symbol of Esperanto. The cemetery still serves the small Jewish community.