By mid-1940, nearly fifty fragments of the wall had been built. It was three metres long and crowned with barbed wire at the top. The borders of the ghetto also led between properties, marked by the walls of buildings. Given its strategic communication importance to the entire city, Chłodna Street was excluded from the ghetto area. The wall was erected next to the pavements and a footbridge built over the street, which connected the “small” and “large” ghetto.
“The walls have several outlets. A guard, in the local dialect “Wacha”, is stationed at the outlets. It comprises a few armed Germans, looking at the crowd with contempt, Polish police officers and servile Jewish police officers, who get hit in the face when they misbehave. At yours, on the side of the district, there are swarms of ragged children, and on the Aryan side, crowds of spectators looking at the event” - noted Hirszfeld.
In the autumn of 1941, the death penalty was introduced for leaving the designated area or providing assistance to the Jews.
On the 80th anniversary marking the closure of the ghetto borders, the Warsaw Ghetto Museum in cooperation with the Social and Cultural Society of Jews in Poland commemorates this date. The social campaign ‘There was a Wall’ is our remembrance of hundreds of thousands of people forced into isolation. On 16 November, candles of memory will be lit in places reminiscent of this history. The main ceremonies will take place at a fragment of the wall on the premises of a high school, at 53 Sienna Street. Among the partners of the event is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
The programme includes, among others: a series of educational seminars on the situation of Jews during World War II; educational film projects: “Walks in the vestiges of the ghetto” and “The ghetto in literature”; artistic events - video art “Wall/Walls” based on Ischak Berensztein’s prose and the project “people, places, events”, in the first stage depicting artists from Abraham Ostrzega’s shed. Online projects are available on the organisers’ websites: www.1943.pl and www.tskz.pl as well as on social media profiles. The exhibition “Every third among us”, depicting the situation on the other side of the wall, will be on display at Grzybowski Sq in Warsaw until the end of November. The events are held under the honorary patronage of the Mayor of the Capital City of Warsaw.