Touring the Warsaw Ghetto Area

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The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazi Germany in Warsaw during the German Occupation in World War II. Between 1941 and 1943, starvation, disease and deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps dropped the population of the ghetto from an estimated 450,000 to approximately 70,000. In 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto was the scene of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe.

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Photos

The palace of culture built by the communist Party as a symbol of their empire
Known as "Stalin's gift" built b/w 1952-1955 as a present from the USSR to the people of Warsaw. It is am imposing structure, but many Varsovians understandably detest it and woud llike to see it demolished, or obscured by other tall buldings. Much of the area was in Jewish ownership before the war.

Monument to the Ghetto Heroes
This monument shows the Ghetto Heroes fighters (mostly young people) breaking away from the burning ghetto. An injured man carries a home-made granade, and a young woman carries a gun. The back of the monument shows old people, women and children being marched to an extermination camp by Nazi guards.

Stawki hospital
This building, 6/8 Stawki Street, was formerly a hospital. During the Second World War it bordered onto the Umschlagplatz and was used by the Germans to hold deportees prior to their being sent to their deaths at Treblinka extermination camp. Ghastly scenes occurred here.

Now a school, this building used to be a deportation site for Jews
This building was formerly a hospital used by the Germans in WWII to hold deportees prior to their being sent to thier deaths at Treblinka extermination camp.

The Umschlagplatz
The Umschlagplatz (literally 'transshipment square') was the former railway siding by Dzika Street. Here the Nazis loaded deportees onto cattle trucks to be 'resettled in the east', which in practice meant being sent to the extermination camp at Treblinka, 60 kilometres (40 miles) north-east of Warsaw. During the Great Deportation several thousand people were being sent from here each day. Prior to this it had been the Transferstelle, a sort of customs control dealing with the movement of goods in and out of the ghetto.

The Umschlagplatz Memorial
This marble monument, designed by architect Hanna Szmalenberg and sculptor Wladyslaw Klamerus, was put up in 1988. The blocks resemble the cattle trucks which took the deportees to their deaths. The black and white colour scheme is inspired by Jewish ritual robes, while the black semi-circle over the entrance, depicting a fallen forest, refers to the symbols on Jewish gravestones.

several hundred Jewish first names
Over 300,000 people were sent from this place to be gassed at Treblinka. A moving feature of the memorial is the way that it commemorates these hundreds of thousands of dead by giving a simple list of several hundred Jewish first names

Aleja Jana Pawla II
This broad north-south road cuts straight through the middle of the former ghetto area. Many sections of it did not exist before the war. Now named after Pope John Paul II, it is the only road in Warsaw to be named after a living individual. The surrounding buildings give a good idea of the modern blocks that replaced the lost tenements. It is virtually impossible to imagine what the district looked like before 1943-1944.

Old flats, could even be from the war or right after the war, 50s.
Inside what used to be the Warsaw ghetto

These flats could also date from war/guetto times
Inside what used to be the Warsaw ghetto