A negative discovered in the archives of Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski, a former firefighter in Warsaw, who took these photos in 1943. These are the only known pictures whose author is not German. ZL GRZYWACZEWSKI / FAMILY ARCHIVE / POLIN MUSEUM
There are a hundred of them this morning in mid-April to meditate at the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw, Rue Okopowa, a few days before the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A handful of curious people, civil servants, diplomats, representatives of Jewish associations and members of Senna Kolektyw – a collective of architects and artists working to preserve Jewish memory in Poland. Everyone came to dedicate a glass wall that contrasts with the surrounding tombstones.
The transparent brick building is reminiscent of the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto and, through the engravings, recalls the diversity of profiles of Oneg Shabbat members. These sixty scientists, writers, historians, rabbis gathered around the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, had only one goal: to document life in the ghetto – which was walled up in November 1940 – and the massacres of Polish Jews under Nazi occupation during World War II.
This group of archivists suffered the same fate as the residents of the ghetto walls of which they were a part: deprivation, humiliation, famine, epidemics, deportations, exterminations… Two of the three members of Oneg Shabbat are said to have survived May 1943 until liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto will allow to find the metal boxes and milk jugs with the valuable archives buried by the Jewish militants in the Warsaw basement.
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“We wanted to pay tribute to those who risked their lives to reveal ghetto life to the whole world. We don’t even know where they rest today,” says Natalia Romik, academic and architect who helped design the monument. “Some were religious, some were secular, some were right-wing, some were left-wing, all working together in perfect brotherhood,” adds the Warsaw resident, who also works to make hiding places of Jews in the Polish capital visible.
“A Thousand Fighters”
April 19 remains a special day in Warsaw, with sirens sounding at 12 noon to commemorate the greatest act of Jewish rebellion in World War II. On this day eighty years ago, several hundred fighters took up arms against the Nazi troops who had come to finally liquidate the ghetto. “We knew very well that we would have no chance of winning. We fought to prevent the Germans from choosing the date and place of our death themselves,” testified a few years later Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the uprising and one of its rare survivors. On May 16, 1943, the Nazis gradually burned down the buildings of the ghetto.
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