Showcase 3

Jewish child by the ghetto wall

1.

“The second impression is ‘walls’. They grow in various places out of the blue, locking the streets away. Such walls can be seen in
the Old Town, near Marszafkowska Street (Sienna, Swietokrzyska, Prozna) and on Dluga Street. Why those walls? Nobody knows. Optimists say it’s for strategy, pessimists say it’s the future ghetto. This is what everybody fears.”

Marek Stok, Journal entry from the summer of 1940

2.

“On the odd side [of Muranowska Street], just beside the pavement, a high red-brick wall topped with broken glass and sharp metal spikes separated – in a very mechanical way two districts of one and the same city, two living parts of one and the same organism.
In the middle of the street a tram line, and further only some scarce tenement houses. And from behind them, there peeked the wide world so close and yet so strange, free and yet only deluding under the guise of freedom.”

Cezary Ketling-Szemley, Account of December 1942

3.

“The streets have been chopped, cropped out, and savaged in a sophisticated though quite an abstract manner. Either the walls stretch across the street or the tenement house has just been excluded from the Jewish district. [ … ] every other month, they make a new alteration in the district borders, which in fact means only yet another torment in a chain of never-ending harassments and persecutions. Tens of thousands of people, usually for the second, third, often even fourth time within a few days are forced to resettle. [ … ] Nobody is certain any longer if the walls would not devour them.”

Stanislaw Rozycki, “This is the Ghetto!”, an account, December 1941