Descendants of the 400,000 Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto marked the 80th anniversary of their doomed uprising against their Nazi occupiers on Wednesday with concerts, exhibitions and speeches given by Polish, German and Israeli leaders. Family members of the survivors gathered to share their ancestors’ stories and asked questions about Poland’s fight against anti-Semitism today.
There are few visible traces of the 1,000-year-old Jewish presence in the Polish capital of Warsaw today. Only several walls and a synagogue built in 1902, which was used as stables by German occupying troops in WWII, remain.
But the story of those imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, and their doomed, heroic uprising against their Nazi occupiers, is vividly told at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
The imposing museum, which was opened in 2013, tells the history of the Jewish community in Poland, the largest in the world until WWII. Exhibits include a replica of a wooden synagogue from the 17th century that was destroyed in 1941. There are chilling descriptions of how the Nazis murdered European Jews, killing90% of Poland’s three million Jews.
Although Poland has seen several episodes of anti-Semitism since the end of World War II, the museum's creation has been almost unanimously welcomed.
It is undoubtedly a step forward in the fight against the prejudice and violence that Jews in Poland have suffered throughout history and that sporadically resurface in the country.
The POLIN museum, a shrine in memory of the Ghetto
“This museum is incredible,” said Anette Weynszteyn, who had come from Sao Paulo, Brazil to attend the opening ceremony of a temporary exhibition which features a photo of her mother.
“My mother never spoke about what happened during the war until she was interviewed by the Shoah Foundation [Editor’s note: a project launched by Steven Spielberg in 1994 to gather filmed testimonies of Holocaust survivors.] That’s how I learned that everyone in my mother’s family, Jewish Poles, had died during the war,” she explained.
The exhibition, “Around Us a Sea of Fire”, marks the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and aims to portray the hell of the ghetto by drawing on civilians’ experiences through personaldocuments such as writings and photos.
A plaque below the photo of Weynszteyn’s mothertells her story. Stefania Milenbach was just 22 years old in 1943. Her parents, her sister and her husband had been deported to the Treblinkadeath camp where they subsequently died. But Milenbach, along with a small group of people, managed to hide in the rubble of the Ghetto, which had been methodically destroyed by the Nazis between April 19 and May 16, 1943.
She gave birth to a child who died of hunger several days later and managed to survive the last two years of war before emigrating to Israel then Brazil in 1950.
“I came for the first time in 2012, to learn more about this story because it is my story,” Weynszteyn said.
Comments