ARCHAEOLOGY
AT THE SITE OF THE FORMER WARSAW GHETTO SHEDS DRAMATIC AND POIGNANT LIGHT
AND POIGNANT LIGHT
“Finding these objects and giving them to the world is for me giving a voice to their owners,” Dr. Jacek Konik, an archaeologist and historian at the Warsaw Ghetto Museum who is leading the dig, told JHE .
They could not tell their own story because someone did not allow them to and decided that they had no right to live. Now, thanks to our research, they can speak and tell a part of their story. I am glad that I can at least help them speak in this way. It is a kind of inner need and obligation for me. If I had been born earlier, I might have been in their shoes.
Work began June 7, conducted by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum together with a team of scientists from Christopher Newport University in the U.S. and the Aleksander Gieysztor Academy in Pułtusk, Poland.
The dig was scheduled to last to the end of June but has been extended until the end of July, and volunteers are welcome. (To volunteer, contact: [email protected])
Established in 2018 by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the Ghetto Museum, currently under development, is due to open in a complex of buildings that was a pre-WW2 children’s hospital in April 2023 — the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The excavations are concentrated on the site where two pre-war apartment buildings stood; they were located between two streets, with entrances at Miła 18 and Muranowska 39 and at Miła 20 and Muranowska 41. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which began on April 19, 1943, a bunker in the basement that had been used by smugglers housed the headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organization, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz. On May 8, 1943, as the Germans closed in, Anielewicz and scores of other Ghetto fighters committed mass suicide in the bunker. The bodies were never exhumed.
A commemorative mound made of rubble was built over the site after the war, and memorials were placed later.
This summer’s excavations seek to establish details about the bunker — but they do not touch the area in which the Ghetto fighters died. Archaeologists have uncovered walls and structural elements, as well as a range of objects.
“These excavations are important because they are the first archaeological excavations since the end of the war in the area where the headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organisation (ŻOB) was located,” Konik told JHE.
He said the researchers were trying “to verify information about the ‘bunker’ of Mordechai Anielewicz and his comrades that comes from memoirs and accounts.”
He stressed that they are not working in the central part of the bunker, as “it is a grave, and we are not digging in the grave,” but rather on the periphery of the site, where they “are likely to find one of its six exits.”
Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, is informed about the excavations, and Konik said work would halt if human remains were discovered.
The research, Konik said, “makes it possible to verify and, on the other [hand], to complete the picture of life in Warsaw’s Jewish community as it has been known up to now from photographs, films and written records.”
For example, he told JHE, some of the discoveries, including prayer books and the remains of a burned library, indicated that “religious life flourished in these buildings.”
“The Talmud, a prayer book (Sidur) and a novel in Polish were identified,” he said. They appear to have all stood together on one shelf.
A child’s shoe. Kitchen utensils. Crockery. Books. Ceramic tiles. Corroded tools. Discoveries during archaeological excavations this summer on the site of the WW2 Warsaw Ghetto are shedding dramatic — and poignant — light on the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Jews confined to the area and are furthering research on the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Jewish Heritage Europe