"Grandmother Masza had twenty grandchildren, Grandmother Hana eleven – but I am the only one still alive."
Jacek Eisner
Inscription on the memorial to child victims of the Holocaust at the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw
The boundaries of the former Warsaw Ghetto are marked today by memorials recalling the history and suffering that took place here. On 16 November 1940 the German occupation authorities sealed the ghetto off from the rest of the city. Initially the walled area covered around 307 hectares, but it was repeatedly reduced in size.
From January 1942 the ghetto was divided into a large and a small section. Around 360,000 Jews from Warsaw and another 90,000 people deported from surrounding towns were confined there. Conditions were unbearable and approximately 100,000 people died from hunger, disease and deprivation.
Mass deportations to the extermination camps began in the summer of 1942. Around 300,000 Jews from Warsaw were murdered at Treblinka. On 19 April 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. Fighters and civilians resisted until mid-May, while the Germans systematically burned and destroyed the district. The remaining prisoners were deported, and only a small number survived.
Most of the walls were removed after the war. Small surviving sections can be seen in courtyards at ul. Waliców 9/11, ul. Sienna 55 and ul. Złota 62. These protected fragments remain silent witnesses to the former boundary. Individual bricks have also been placed in memorial institutions including Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
The memorial route connects significant sites associated with the fate of Warsaw's Jewish population. Among the most important are the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, the Anielewicz Bunker memorial and the Umschlagplatz monument.
This powerful monument is one of the world's best-known memorials to Jewish resistance during the Second World War. Its central bronze relief shows Jewish fighters carrying Molotov cocktails, pistols and grenades, while a young woman holds a child. Flames behind the figures symbolise the ghetto destroyed by the Germans.
The monument is the principal site of remembrance for the heroes and victims of the ghetto. Official ceremonies and state commemorations are held here. In December 1970 West German Chancellor Willy Brandt unexpectedly knelt before the monument in a historic gesture of mourning and responsibility.
Towards the end of the uprising, members of the Jewish Combat Organisation led by Mordechaj Anielewicz took refuge in a bunker beneath the house at ul. Miła 18. German forces discovered the shelter on 8 May 1943. Around 120 fighters, including Anielewicz, died there rather than surrender.
A memorial mound now marks the site. Since no exhumation was carried out, it is also a collective grave and a solemn memorial to resistance.
At the Umschlagplatz on ul. Stawki, thousands of Jews were assembled each day in 1942 and 1943 before being forced into freight wagons and deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.
On 5 August 1942 Dr Janusz Korczak and almost 200 children from his orphanage were deported from this place. In total, an estimated 300,000 people were transported from the Umschlagplatz to their deaths.
The present monument resembles a railway wagon. Its walls bear hundreds of Jewish and Polish first names, symbolically representing the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.
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