Editor’s note: I have never been to Poland. But as a Jew, I feel a connection to a place where so many of my people lived – and died. As an aside, if after reading this powerful piece by Sam Spector you want to immerse even more in the events of the Warsaw Ghetto, Mila 18 by Leon Uris is a spectacular novel that uses fictional characters to do justice to what happened. For more of Sam’s writing, please click here to visit his index page.

The story of Warsaw is the story of a city that rose from the ashes like a phoenix after World War II. During the war, nearly 90% of Poland’s capital was destroyed, and estimates as high as 800,000 individuals were killed, all to crush the morale of the Polish people, destroy their culture, and end resistance. Until it was surpassed by New York with its massive wave of Jewish immigration in the early 1900s, Warsaw was the most populated Jewish city in the world with 400,000 Jewish souls, but nearly all perished during the Holocaust. Today, Warsaw has once again emerged as a sprawling urban metropolis, the capital and largest city of Poland with 3.3 million people living in its metropolitan area.

Unlike Krakow (click here to read about Krakow), whose historic areas remained largely intact after the war, due to the destruction, Warsaw is a mainly modern city, but has a special feeling in its architecture and its many green spaces. One place that gives a feeling of “what once was” is Warsaw’s Old Town. In its large cobblestone Old Town Market Square there is a statue of Syrena, a mermaid brandishing a sword, who is Warsaw’s symbol. According to legend, Syrena emerged from the Vistula River, Poland’s largest river, which cuts through the city, and defended the city from a greedy merchant. The Old Town was destroyed during the war, but it has been rebuilt to reflect its renaissance and medieval roots. The Old Town has great craft brew pubs, bars, and restaurants.

If one is not interested in Jewish history, I would skip Warsaw and go to Krakow as I do not think the city offers much beyond the Jewish history and an evening in the Old Town. In exploring the Jewish history of the town, a great place to start and spend a few hours is the POLIN Museum, which opened in 2013. The museum tells the entire history of Jewish Poland, not just the tragic six years during which over 90% of Polish Jewry was eradicated during World War II. The beautifully designed museum is in the heart of what was the Warsaw Ghetto. For many, the highlight of the POLIN is a 17th century wooden synagogue that has been restored inside the museum.

Opposite the museum entrance is the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, built between 1946 and 1948 on the location of the Judenrat, the Jewish council of the ghetto, a place where many clashes with the Nazis occurred. The monument, made by Warsaw-born Jewish sculptor Nathan Rapoport, has figures emerging from a wall, meant to evoke both the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto and Jerusalem’s Western Wall. A relief depicts men, women, and children carrying guns and Molotov cocktails, standing up to resist the Nazis, with a muscular Mordechai Anielewicz, the 23 year old martyr and leader of the uprising standing front and center. The eastern side of the monument shows the persecution of Jews at the hands of the Nazis with the words “Jewish nation to its fighters and martyrs.” This monument has been replicated at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, and gained it infamy when West German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before it during his 1970 Warsaw visit. A short walk away is the Mila 18 Bunker Memorial, which was bunker headquarters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising leaders, and where they died and were entombed beneath the rubble, including Anielewicz. Today, the mound is covered in green grass and there is a plaque commemorating the heroes buried below.

While most of the Warsaw Ghetto was destroyed after its uprising and liquidation, there are still a few small fragments of what once was an 18 kilometer wall. The most notable fragment is down an alley at 62 Zlota Street. At this small section of 6 meter high wall, there is a plaque that was laid by Israeli president Chaim Herzog in 1992, and individual bricks that have been removed to be displayed in Holocaust museums around the world. There is also a small memorial next to the wall on the fence of the house connected to the wall in memory of the owner, who died not long ago, and advocated for the wall to be preserved and used to run out to meet groups and have them sign his guestbook.

Another area where you can see fragments of the wall is at the Jewish Cemetery. This cemetery is one of the most fascinating ones in Europe. At 33 hectares and between 200,000 and 300,000 graves, this cemetery is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the world. There are mixes of elaborate and simple graves, of monuments for different events, including monuments for Warsaw natives who were killed in wars or terrorist attacks in Israel, those who perished in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Warsaw Uprising. There is a monument to Janusz Korczak, the pediatrician and children’s author who was murdered alongside the children in his orphanage during the Holocaust. Korczak was given the opportunity to be spared but refused to leave the children and walked with them into the gas chamber. The cemetery is also the resting place of S. An-sky, famed folklore writer, and Ludwik Zamenhof, the inventor of the Esperanto language, developed in the late 19th century to be a universal language that would replace all others. Zamenhoff’s grave has the Esperanto flag on it, a multicolored flag with a centered turquoise star with an “E” emblazoned upon it. Almost next to Zamenhoff’s grave is that of Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Judenrat during the war, who was ordered by the Nazis to create a list of children to send to death camps. As an act of resistance to such a cruel demand, Czerniakow refused and took his own life. Constructed in 2022, there is a new monument on top of two mass graves, containing the remains of thousands, among Europe’s largest mass graves of Holocaust victims. The monuments have hundreds of large, scattered stones and a pillar with rebar and loose bricks suspended midair.

Within the former ghetto is a memorial called the Memory of Footbridge to what was referred to as the “Bridge of Sighs”. The Bridge of Sighs was a footbridge that crossed a major street in Warsaw. As the ghetto was so large, it intruded on traffic getting across the city. To contain the Jews into the ghetto and not disrupt the flow of the city, there were pedestrian bridges built across the roads that connected one side of the ghetto to the other. Today there are beams as memorials where the bridge once stood and pictures to show what it looked like as Jews would pass from one side of the road to the other without encountering privileged gentiles. One other important Jewish landmark in Warsaw is the Nozyk Synagogue. This large Romanesque Revival-style Orthodox synagogue was built between 1898 and 1902 and remains active today. It is built in a similar style to the choral synagogues that were popularly rising up at the time in Eastern Europe. There is a large prayer section on the main floor with balconies above that were traditionally for the women. The reason for this synagogue’s survival during World War II is sad and sinister. To degrade the local Jewish population and for practice purposes, the Nazis used the synagogue as a stable for their horses, and it is for this reason alone that the synagogue was not destroyed like its contemporaries in the city.

Not far away is one of the most important monuments in Warsaw, the Warsaw Uprising Monument, dedicated to the 1944 Polish resistance uprising in Krasinski Square. The 33 foot bronze monument shows resistance fighters running in combat to fight, while a smaller section of the monument shows fighters going into a manhole, a display of the rescue of the resistance fighters from the Old City. While the uprising was supposed to last only three days, it was able to survive for two months until it was quashed and Warsaw was destroyed; the story is captured in the interactive Warsaw Uprising Museum.

While I prefer Krakow to Warsaw, a visit to this city is inspiring. It shows tragedy, destruction, resistance, heroism, hope, and rebuilding all in one. While other capital cities in Europe offer more for visitors, there is not another one that will stir greater emotion.

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