Jewish Cemetery Warsaw July 16

The Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw

On Okopowa Street in Warsaw, Poland sits an old Jewish cemetery - one of the very few to have survived World War II. Founded in 1806, the cemetery consists of 82 acres and contains the remains of approximately 250,000 people. Unfortunately, the Nazis burned the cemetery's records, so no one really knows how many are buried here.

When the Warsaw ghetto was sealed in November 1940, this cemetery was enclosed inside the ghetto. Though the ghetto wall surrounded the cemetery, there was only one entrance from the ghetto into the cemetery; mourners needed special passes to get past the guards posted at this entrance. In the beginning of the ghetto, ghetto residents who died were buried in individual graves, but soon the deaths in the ghetto were so numerous that the dead were buried in mass graves here.

Upon entering the cemetery, the first thing that strikes you is a short wall in front of you. Though the tombstones in this cemetery were not taken by the Nazis to use for roads, many were uprooted and broken. The wall is made of pieces of tombstones.

Vladka Meed (who organized the trip that I am on) visited this cemetery in 1945 right after liberation. She describes the destruction:

Wherever I turned, there was nothing but overturned tombstones, desecrated graves and scattered skulls - skulls, their dark sockets burning deep into me, their shattered jaws demanding, "Why? Why has this befallen us?"

Although I knew that these atrocities were the handiwork of the so-called "dentists" - Polish ghouls who searched the mouths of the Jewish corpses to extract their gold-capped teeth, I nevertheless felt strangely guilty and ashamed. Yes, Jews were persecuted even in their graves. "

 The children were the ones who so often snuck through holes in the ghetto wall to smuggle food into the ghetto, often facing death. For this reason, on the right side of the memorial (the brick structure symbolizes the ghetto wall) is a poem written by Henryka Lazowert in 1941 entitled "The Little Smuggler." In the center of the memorial, pictures of children lie embedded within what looks like rocks. Though it is easy to miss since visitors stand on it, notice the stone menorah walkway leading up to the memorial.

And yet he was also loved and adored. This monument is in honor of Janusz Korczak, fondly nicknamed "the king of the children." Though Korczak dedicated his whole life to helping children, he is best known for his brave walk with the 200 children in his care through the ghetto to the deportation trains and on to the Treblinka death camp. This memorial, created by Mieczyslaw Smorczewski, shows Korczak carrying one child, followed by several others, on their way to the trains. Around the base of the monument are hundreds of small candles lit in his memory. (I am sorry for the poor picture quality.)

Though appointed head of the Warsaw Ghetto's Judenrat (Jewish Council) by the Nazis in October 1939, Adam Czerniakow tried to balance life in the ghetto with the demands of the Nazis. Being head of a Judenrat was an extremely difficult job, he had to try to keep the ghetto population alive while the Nazis wished and planned them dead. When Czerniakow was ordered by the Nazis to gather and deport the children of the ghetto, Czerniakow committed suicide on July 23, 1942 rather than to deport the children. We know much about the life of this leader from Czerniakow's diary that survived the war.

**Information here is from about.com.