Warsaw – Warsaw Ghetto Remnant at 62 Złota Street

I thought that I’d written about this section of the Warsaw ghetto wall before, but it seems that I just wrote about the footprint of the wall. There are very few remnants of the former ghetto wall still standing, even though it was once 18 kilometres in length.

There’s a map of the ghetto wall displayed. There’s also a really useful one at https://travegeo.com/Warsaw_Ghetto-22948?sharemap which shows the old ghetto on top of a modern map. The ghetto does look like it covers a large area, but at its peak there were 460,000 Jews living within the boundaries. The ghetto was liquidated in 1942, although by then many had died of starvation.

A number of bricks have been removed from the wall and sent to other institutions around the world, including Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in Australia. I had a look at the virtual tour of the museum in Melbourne and it seems a little surreal seeing the missing brick in their collections, a reminder of how important these fragments are. So much was destroyed in Warsaw during the Second World War and these remnants are now overlooked by skyscrapers and shiny new buildings, but that they still exist is hugely important.