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Warsow poland3/27/2023 ![]() Korcszak chose to die with the children he looked after the Nazis shot them all in the cemetery. Janusz Korcszak.īerg witnessed Korcszak calmly escort the orphaned children, ranging from 13 years to toddlers only 2-3 years old, comforting and reassuring them, as they walked down the street to the Genscher cemetery, unaware of the fate that awaited them there. I thought of how she also witnessed the raid on the children’s home that was visible from her cell window. She was a young Jewish girl who was imprisoned in the cellar of Pawiak prison, and from her cell window witnessed the raids where the Nazis gathered up Jews to be shipped to Treblinka. Within a Pawiak corridor lined with jail cells, I thought of Mary Berg. Photo of Warsaw's destruction in 1945 inside the Museum of Pawiak Prison. Inside the prison, I snapped this photograph of the city of Warsaw in 1945, an image which depicts its utter destruction: In 2017, I visited there on a museum tour of Germany and Poland with Alexandra Richie. Today, Pawiak prison is a museum in Warsaw. Historian Alexandra Richie observed: “The destruction of Warsaw was unique even in the terrible history of the Second World War, and was the only time that Hitler actually put into practice the insane notion of erasing an entire capital city.” Needless to say, Warsaw continued to suffer under Soviet control, and Poland did not regain political independence until the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union in 1989-1991. Thirty percent of the destruction of the now virtually leveled city had taken place after Polish capitulation to the Germans, in the last five months of 1944. A beautiful city over a millennium old had been obliterated, house by house, almost even brick by brick. No stone to remain standing.”Īfter the Red Army launched the Oder-Vistula Offensive and arrived in Warsaw after five days of fighting on January 17, 1945, they found a wasteland. Heinrich Himmler told SS officers: “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. As soon as he heard about the uprising, however, Adolf Hitler ordered the city razed.Įven after the Nazis destroyed the Polish resistance fighters, the physical destruction of the city itself remained a priority. Joseph Stalin halted the Red Army on the eastern side of the Vistula River. When the Red Army approached to liberate the city in summer 1944, the Warsaw Poles rose up against the Germans to assist the Soviet forces-who never came. In April 1943, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto chose to revolt against the Germans and hopeless odds the Germans ruthlessly crushed those within the Ghetto before shutting it down in August 1943. In the summer of 1942, mass deportations of Ghetto inhabitants began to the extermination camp at Treblinka, where ultimately at least 700,000 people were murdered. The Nazis established the Warsaw Ghetto for the city’s Jewish population in November 1940, cramming over 400,000 people into what was in reality a 1.3 square mile cordoned-off prison. ![]() Adolf Hitler rode triumphantly through the city in October 1939, a month after the commencement of the war. Warsaw was the first European capital conquered by Nazi Germany. The tree and the gate, still standing, are singular reminders of the razing of Warsaw and the suffering the city had undergone when Hitler’s forces finally retreated from Warsaw 75 years ago. The lead image in this post is of a special place in the city: it shows the Monument Tree and part of the gate at the entryway to Pawiak prison. ![]() Perhaps no city suffered more than Warsaw during World War II. Top Image: Remnant of Pawiak prison gate and Monument Tree, Warsaw, Poland.
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