The Warsaw Uprising Museum

Warsaw can be psychologically challenging for the first-time visitor. Everywhere you walk around the west-central part of the city you see markings on the sidewalk showing where the walls of the Jewish ghetto stood. Nearly a half-million Jews from Warsaw and other towns were herded into it. The difficult thing is knowing that almost all of them died as a result. Nearly 100,000 perished of hunger. Another 300,000 were murdered in the gas chambers at Treblinka.

On April 19, 1943, an uprising broke out in the ghetto. Until mid-May, fighters and civilians perished in combat or in the systematically burned ghetto buildings. The remaining population was murdered in November 1943 in the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps.

If you have time to visit only one museum, in Warsaw, make it the audacious Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The story it tells is a little more coherent. But this is a great museum, too, and I learned a lot.

For instance: In 1957, some East German filmmakers tricked Nazi military commander Heinz Reinefarth, then serving as mayor of the German muncipality of Westerland, into implicating himself in the mass killing of civilians in Warsaw's Wola district, where this museum stands. 

Over three days in August 1944 the Germans murdered everyone in Wola regardless of age or gender. They did not spare patients or hospital staff, priests or nuns. People were taken from their homes and shot with machine guns.  The Germans threw grenades into cellars where people had taken shelter.

Der Spiegel followed up with a series establishing Reinefarth's culpability. 

German investigators had hundreds of Polish witness statements proving the mass execution of civilians. But war crimes were not a priority of that nation's postwar judiciary. Courts were dominated by former Nazis and the statute of limitations was fast approaching. No charges were ever filed. Reinefarth died in 1979.

Another exhibition involves hundreds of paper cutouts made by Janina Gyedroyc-Wawrzynowicz for her daughter Roza to distract her from wartime daily life. Painted with precision on watercolor paper, the two-dimensional dolls represent residents of a single Warsaw townhouse.

Such a good mom. The parallels with the isolation posed by the recent pandemic are unmistakable. School classes were suspended, it was often unsafe for people to meet face to face, and everyone had to deal with the persistent threat of disease and death of their loved ones.

Watch your step. The museum is dark, and the flooring can be uneven. Too many people were admitted on this rainy day. Crowding can't help but detract from the museum experience. I suggest going first thing in the morning or around 4:30 ― ninety minutes before closing time.

If you're able, take a walk around the neighborhood. This is the "Under the Clock" tenement on Chlodna Street.

It somehow survived the ghetto's annihilation and was home to Adam Czerniakow, who was head of the Judenrat, the Jewish administrative body responsible for implementing German orders in the ghetto. On the second day of the ghetto's liquidation, July 23, 1942, he killed himself in his office by taking cyanide.