What was the Warsaw Ghetto? The walled district and its people

What was the Warsaw Ghetto? It was a closed district in the middle of occupied Warsaw, where the German authorities forced the Jews of the city to live behind walls. The governor of the Warsaw District, Ludwig Fischer, signed the order for it on 12 October 1940 and required every Jew in Warsaw to move inside.⁸ Its borders were sealed on 16 November 1940.¹ From then on, a wall and armed posts cut through streets that Jewish and Christian neighbors had shared for generations.

The district measured about 4 square kilometers, and people could pass in or out only through 22 guarded gates, and only with a permit.³ The Jewish Community of Warsaw counts about 450,000 Jews inside in April 1941.⁴ The Warsaw Tourism Office gives a lower peak figure of 400,000 people.⁹ The Jewish Community and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum both describe it as the largest ghetto that Nazi Germany created in occupied Europe.^2,10

Keep that scale in mind before any Warsaw Jewish history tour. Most of the streets you will walk in Muranów and on the western edge of the city center lay inside the wall or along it, yet almost none of the original houses stand. After the war, new housing went up on the ruins of the former Jewish quarter.¹¹ The tourist office points out that the knolls and steps of today's Muranów are the ruins themselves.¹² The ground under the lawns is part of the story.

Persecution began long before the wall. Adam Czerniaków was appointed head of the Jewish community on 23 September 1939, and in October the Germans also made him chairman of the Judenrat they had imposed.⁴⁰ Step by step the occupiers forced Jews to wear Star of David armbands, shut the synagogues, banned shared prayer in private homes and closed parts of the city to them.⁴¹ Each rule narrowed the space in which a family could live, work and pray.

The order of October 1940 turned those rules into a line on the map.⁸ The Warsaw Ghetto Museum lists the boundary streets, among them Grzybowski Square, Elektoralna, Bankowy Square, Tłomackie, Nalewki, Stawki, Okopowa, Towarowa and Złota.⁴² Read on a modern street plan, those names trace a ring around Muranów and the western part of the center. Today a line set into the pavement near Złota Street carries the words ghetto wall and the years 1940 to 1943.⁴³

The ghetto was never a single block. Chłodna Street was kept outside it as a road for non-Jews, splitting the Small Ghetto from the Large Ghetto. On 26 January 1942 the Germans opened a wooden footbridge over Chłodna at Żelazna Street to link the two parts.¹³ A light installation, the Footbridge of Remembrance, now marks the place and is most striking after dark.³⁶ Crossing under it today takes seconds; for those who climbed it, the street below was a world they could not enter.

Some of those inside decided that their story had to outlive them. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum led a secret group called Oneg Shabbat, which met in the library building on Tłomackie Street and gathered evidence of Jewish life and death under the occupation.⁷⁸ That building lay inside the ghetto from November 1940 until March 1942.⁷⁹ Its members collected diaries, reports, posters, drawings and testimony with the care of historians.

The papers went into metal containers and milk cans, hidden in the cellars of the house that then stood at 68 Nowolipki Street.⁸⁰ While the deportations went on outside, 19-year-old Dawid Graber wrote his own testament for the archive.⁸¹ His note is dated 3 August 1942 at 4 PM.⁸² The hidden archive was dug up after the war, part in 1946 and part in 1950.⁸³ A monument now marks the hiding place, between Nowolipki 28 and 30.³¹

Ringelblum himself hid on the other side of the wall with his family, in a bunker under a greenhouse that sheltered about 40 people.⁸⁴ The Germans found the hideout in March 1944.⁸⁵ Ringelblum died on 10 March 1944, killed in the ruins of the ghetto.^86,87 UNESCO added his archive to its Memory of the World list in 1999, and you can see one of the milk cans at the Jewish Historical Institute.^88,33

Those who remained rose in arms when German forces entered the ghetto on 19 April 1943, and the fighting went on until 16 May 1943.¹⁵ On that last day the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street was dynamited by the Germans to mark the end of the ghetto.¹⁶ The tourist office records that the district was then razed to the ground.⁹⁴ The story of that rising, its fighters and its memorials is a subject in its own right, and the bunker site on Miła Street is the place to start it.

Few of Warsaw's Jews lived to see liberation. By 1946 about 18,000 Jews lived in the city, and by the early 1970s it had fallen to around 2,000.^28,95 Today the community counts over 700 adult members.⁹⁶ It still prays in the Nożyk Synagogue, the only synagogue in Warsaw to survive the war.⁹⁷ Seeing that building in use, with prayer books open and lights on, is part of understanding both what was lost and what continues.

Since 2013 the POLIN Museum, devoted to the long history of Polish Jews, has been the focal point of Muranów, built on ground that lay inside the ghetto.^53,98 Iron slabs set into the pavement still mark the line of the old boundary across the center.⁷ A historical walking tour of Jewish Warsaw links these scattered traces into one story, and a guide can take the questions this history raises. Walk slowly, read the plaques, and let the empty spaces speak as much as the monuments.