Beschrijving

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition of photographs “Warsaw Jews 1861-1943” organised by the Jewish Historical Institute and the Goethe Institute in Warsaw to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The exhibition was open from 21 May to 30 September 2003 in the gallery of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. // “This exhibition is devoted to the Jews of Warsaw, until 1942 the largest Jewish community in Europe and the world capital of Yiddish culture. This collection of photographs is an attempt to recall a society that was erased from the map of Poland during the Second World War as a result of the Nazis’ genocidal plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. In the case of Warsaw this plan was almost entirely successful. One in three Varsovians was Jewish. The last sign of life from this community, which before the war had numbered almost 400,000 souls, was the Warsaw ghetto uprising (19 April – 16 May 1943), undertaken without any delusions of victory, with the sole aim of dying armed and with dignity. On this, the sixtieth anniversary of that event, we are rekindling the memory of that which was extinguished by the criminal act that was the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. The exhibition starts with the oldest photographs of Warsaw’s Jews and ends with the last images of the ghetto uprising. Janusz Korczak, the personification of human dignity and of all that was best in Warsaw’s Jewish community, once said, long before he was sent with the children of his orphanage to the gas chambers of Treblinka: ‘Warsaw is mine and I am hers. More than that – I am she’. Along with him, Warsaw lost the Polish Jews and Jewish Poles who had once been such an important feature of the face and soul of the city.” [Vera Bagaliantz, Goethe Institute in Warsaw]