Poland: A powerful new commemorative complex marks Warsaw Ghetto mass graves at the Okopowa st Jewish cemetery (see video)

(JHE) — A striking new memorial complex in Warsaw’s Okopowa street Jewish cemetery now marks one of Europe’s biggest World War II mass burial sites — two deep pits containing the mass graves of thousands of Jews who died or were murdered in the streets of the World War II Warsaw Ghetto.

Work was completed at the site in time for International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), but because of the COVID situation and other factors,  formal dedication is planned for the spring, when information panels will also be erected and seedlings will be planted in areas adjoining the stones. 

Designed by a team of architects working at the Archiworks company — Karol Dzik, Maciej Szpalerski and Krzysztof Matuszewski — the 1.3 million zloty (approx €285,000) complex replaces a much simpler memorial placed in the 1980s.

The complex consists two fields of broken stones, symbolizing the thousands of murdered Jews, covering the exact surface of the two burial pits, whose boundaries are marked with low walls made of steel. 

At the central point between them stands an openwork monument  arranged in the shape of a broken column – a symbol of an interrupted life. It incorporates stones suspended in the air, above the black stone slab — a symbolic matzevah — that constituted the central point of the  the 1980s memorial. 

(With its fields of stones covering the area of the pits, the design is reminiscent of that of the Holocaust memorial at the former Nazi death camp in Bełzec, in southeast Poland.  Designed by sculptors Andrzej Sołyga, Marcin Roszczyki, and Zdzisław Pidekoraz, the Bełzec memorial totally fills the entire footprint of the camp, where 500,000 people were killed, covering the area with slag, to make it look like a field of ashes.)

Work related to the Okopowa memorial complex was organized by the Cultural Heritage Foundation, which has been carrying out conservation and cleaning work at the Okopowa  Jewish cemetery since 2017, and the entire project and its execution were closely supervised by the Rabbinic Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland and the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland.

“The mass graves at the Jewish cemetery are one of the most important places that testify to the tragic history of our city and its inhabitants,”  Michał Laszczkowski, President of the Cultural Heritage Foundation, said in a statement announcing the completion of the memorial.

It is almost unimaginable that so many people are buried in such a small area. It is also moving that time has erased the original boundaries of the graves and it was only last year, 75 years after the war, that we were able to correctly delineate them and commemorate the Jews buried there

German troops entered Warsaw on September 29, 1939. The Nazis imposed a Jewish ghetto a year later, on October 12, 1940. In the first months of the occupation, Jews were still able to be buried at Okopowa in individual graves. Later, as scores — or hundreds — of people died in the Warsaw Ghetto every day from hunger, disease, and brutality, a central mass grave was established.

The mass burial site consists of two pits, measuring 10 x 10 and 10 x 20 meters and eight meters deep. They hold the remains of untold thousands of unnamed victims. (Click HERE to see a graphic photo of one of the pits.)

“The mass graves in Warsaw are an overwhelming symbol of the end of the local Jewish community,”  Lesław Piszewski, Chairman of the Board of the Jewish Religious Community in Warsaw, said in the statement.

These are the graves of people who died or were killed in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto. Those who survived were then mostly murdered during the Ghetto Uprising, between April 19 and May 16, 1943 or in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

After the war, the mass grave at the Okopowa Jewish Cemetery was left as an empty, unmarked site, but in the 1980s, the artists Hanna Szmalenberg and Władysław Klamerus commemorated the site by creating a stone circle made of white marble boulders and a black stone slab with an inscription.

Last summer,  the Board of the Jewish Religious Community in Warsaw and the Cultural Heritage Foundation took the decision to commemorate the victims within the exact boundaries of the burial pits.

The boundaries were determined in 2021 by Dr. Sebastian Różycki, from the Department of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Systems of the Warsaw University of Technology. This was made possible thanks to the research work carried out in the cemetery by the Cultural Heritage Foundation in cooperation with the Jewish Historical Institute (JHI), as well as by analysis of aerial photographs and photos from 1941-1942 kept at the JHI, the statement announcing completion of the memorial said.

The establishment of the boundaries resulted in the commencement of archaeological and clean-up works under the supervision of the Rabbinical Commission for Jewish Cemeteries in Poland. As a result, individual symbolic monuments that stood on top of the mass grave were moved to another part of the cemetery.

All work related to the commemorative complex was financed by the Chancellery of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the “War graves and cemeteries in the country” program, as well as by funds from the Jewish Community in Warsaw.

Archaeological works, carried out by the Wykop na Poziomie company, were made possible thanks to the funds of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage and the Mazovian Voivodeship Conservation Office.

Watch a drone video of the memorial: