Obj. ID: 52498  Memorial Route of Martyrdom and Struggle of Jews in Warsaw - block 16 (Icchak Kacenelson)

The unveiling of the route took place on April 18, 1988, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The unveiling of the route took place on April 18, 1988, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The history of the monument is described by Kontanty Gebert:

"For the fortieth anniversary of the Uprising, in 1983, the Polish government, in an unprecedented gesture, invited Jewish organizations from all over the world to parti­cipate. Just as unprecedented was the call of Marek Edelman, the last surviving mem­ber of the Jewish Fighting Organizations command and activist of the then-banned Solidarity Trade Union, for a boycott of the official ceremonies. Edelman's call went largely unheeded, while Solidarity endorsed the unofficial ceremony. Police forcibly prevented trade union participants from laying wreaths at the memorials, outraging local inhabitants, who then joined in the ceremony-turned-demonstration. There­after, until the end of martial law, unofficial ceremonies at the memorials became im­portant Polish patriotic events with the mass participation of the Gentile population.

An offshoot of the activities of the dissident group was the creation of a Civic Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Monuments. Having gained official recog­nition, the Committee decided to build a new Holocaust memorial, breaking with the traditional emphasis on both the Uprising and the de-individualized approach to the Jewish victims who were being commemorated. The project, called the Memorial Route of Jewish Martyrdom and Struggle, designed by architect Hanna Szmalenberg and sculptor Wladyslaw Klamerus, received official approval and was unveiled in 1988, on the forty-fifth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising.

Its basic idea, based on the format adopted by participants in unofficial ceremo­nies, consists of nineteen one-meter high, black syenite blocks spread out between the monument and the Umschlagplatz, two commemorative plaques on the buildings that housed the SS headquarters and the Jewish hospital, and a new Umschlagplatz memorial. Each block commemorates an individual connected with the Ghetto, such as the poet Itzhak Katzenelson, Ghetto fighter Frumka Plotnicka, or religious leader Itzhak Nyssenbaum. Walking along this route, which is a kind of "memory lane," passersby can acquaint themselves with the fates of these leaders and thus gain insight into the personal fates of some of the half million Ghetto victims.

This route leads visitors to the new Umschlagplatz memorial, an enclosure in white marble, with a narrow entrance capped by a black bas-relief representing a forest of felled trees. Facing that entrance is a gap in the opposite wall through which a living tree can be seen. On the inner walls of the memorial, several hundred names are engraved — the first names of the Ghetto victims who were deported to Treblinka. The languages used are Polish, Hebrew, and English, but the list of names is only in Polish, for lack of space.

This new memorial merges with the community's real-life, urban surroundings. Its physically and metaphorically human scale, and the shift in emphasis from the heroic resistance of the few to the tragic fate of the hundreds of thousands, enables passersby to experience a personal relationship with those who lived there. Thus, the history of the Warsaw Ghetto has again become connected with the lives of its latter-day inhabitants, re-creating a bond which the former official version of events had all but broken." [Gebert]