AROUND US A SEA OF FIRE
The remaining inhabitants of the ghetto, approximately 50,000 "civilian" Jews spent many weeks hiding in shelters and bunkers. Against the despair, loneliness, starvation, thirst and fear, they fought for each and every "day, hour, minute." Their quiet resistance was just as important as the resistance of those with guns in their hands. They remained "invisible" for many days - they hid underground and thus refused to comply to German orders. It is precisely their story – the story of the "invisible" ones – that we want to retell in the exhibition.
In a bunker
We will show what a daily life in a bunker was like, the conditions in the shelters and hideouts, the people who shared them and how they coped with their daily routines and basic physiological needs. We will try to recreate the "physical" reality of being confined to a bunker: the darkness, the heat coming from burning buildings, the deficit of space and air, the sounds that were often the only way to find out what was happening on the ground level.
We will focus on the relations developing between the people who hid together, on their feelings and emotions. On one hand - conflicts, fear, panic attacks, lack of hope, the feeling of being abandoned, of the world’s indifference, of a life forsaken. On the other hand - the craving for love and intimacy, the urge to act and take responsibility for others. The lust for life, the will to save oneself and one’s nearest and dearest, building a community whose members supported and protected one another were a way to oppose evil, too.
In the face of death
The exhibition will be devoted to the time in history and to the events that took place, and yet it will touch upon the dilemmas, attitudes and feelings, it will pose questions that remain vital in today’s world. How do we behave in the face of death? Where is the line between struggling to survive and surrendering? What do people feel when they are excluded from society and experience indifference or disdain? Many people in the ghetto described themselves as "drowning", devoid of any hope for a rescue. How do we oppose evil, how do we combat it? What is indifference and where does it lead us? Do we feel ashamed when we witness the suffering of others?
The exhibition will be based on the testimonies of Jews who hid in the bunkers both in the ghetto area and on the "Aryan" side. Since all the objects and keepsakes were destroyed and burnt, words acquire a special role in the exhibition. Not only do they convey the feelings and experiences of their authors, but they also constitute a unique testimony, often the only tangible trace left behind by those who perished in the ghetto.
In the exhibition we will show the negatives of Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski’s photos from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that have been recently discovered among the family keepsakes.
In early December 2022, after several decades, a photographic film was discovered amongst family keepsakes. It contains a set of photos taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Zbigniew Leszek Grzywaczewski, a firefighter at the Warsaw Fire Brigade during the Second World War. The Germans sent the firefighters into the burning ghetto—their job was to ensure the fire did not spread to the houses on the “Aryan” side. It was then that 23-year-old firefighter took the photos.
The images in the photos are often blurred, recorded in a rush, from a hidden location, partially obscured by elements of the immediate surroundings—a window frame, a wall of a building or figures of people standing in the foreground. The photos, albeit so imperfect, are priceless. These are the only photos that we know of taken inside the ghetto during the Uprising whose authors are not the German perpetrators.
The search for the negatives lasted several months. Maciej Grzywaczewski, son of the photographer, was asked by the curators of the exhibition to look through his father’s photographic archive. He discovered the negatives in the very last box.
A total of forty-eight shots were recorded on the film, thirty-three of which depict the ghetto. Aside from the twelve photos that have been published before, held in the form of prints at the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Jewish Historical Institute, there are images that have never been shown before. These are photos depicting the smoke over the ghetto as well as in the streets and courtyards inside the ghetto, burnt-out houses, firefighters putting out the flames, posing on the roof of a building or eating from mess tins in the street. Many images are repeated, especially those of the burning buildings, the ghetto wall and people being led to Umschlagplatz. It seems that Leszek Grzywaczewski tried his best to record these scenes, realising the importance of documenting events inaccessible to the eyes of people on the other side of the ghetto wall.
The photographic film presents a hitherto unknown sequence of individual frames. It testifies to the fact that the author entered the ghetto with his camera more than once. The intensity of light in the photos proves that they were taken at different times of day and in different weather conditions. The frames from the ghetto are interspersed with images of a walk in the park.
The author of the photos spent nearly four weeks in the ghetto (most likely between 21 April and 15 May 1943). In a diary he kept during wartime, he noted:
"The image of these people being dragged out of there [out of the bunkers—ZSK] will stay with me for the rest of my life. Their faces […] with a deranged, absent look. […] figures staggering from hunger and dismay, filthy, ragged. Shot dead en masse; those still alive falling over the bodies of the ones who have already been annihilated."
It’s human to fear, it’s human to suffer, it’s human to oppose evil. In 2023, we invite you to an exhibition which we organize in cooperation with the Holocaust Research Center to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
POLIN Museum