The world’s most famous Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem also has its substitutes in other parts of the world, such as in Milan, Italy. A similar one also exists in Warsaw. How are they different from Israel?

Poles are the nation most represented among the people awarded the medal “Righteous Among the Nation of the World”. They also take care to commemorate those who showed courage and heroism in the hour of the trial.

Right after the symbolic anniversary

June 5, 2014, in Warsaw at the square. Gorzechowski’s Jura, the Polish Garden of the Righteous was officially opened. Where did this date stem from? It refers to the 25th anniversary of the first partially free elections in Poland, which took place on June 4, 1989, after the years of communism. The idea of the Garden was conceived by the History Meeting House and the Gariwo Foundation, which opened the first such place in Milan in 2003.

The square on which the Garden is located is the site of the former women’s prison “Serbia” where German Nazis imprisoned and tortured women during World War II.

Who was commemorated?

The Warsaw Garden of the Righteous is slightly different from that at Yad Vashem. Poles in their Garden commemorate not only those people who opposed to persecuting Jews. There are trees dedicated to people from all over the world who supported the persecuted from all nations.

In the Garden, there is a tree for Witold Pilecki – “a volunteer to KL Auschwitz”, who created underground structures in the death camp and passed on information about German crimes committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau to the world. Another commemorated person is Antonia Locatelli – a nun who informed the world about the genocide of the Tutsi tribe and was martyred in Rwanda. There is also a tree dedicated to the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed for exposing the crimes of the Putin regime in Chechnya.

The full list of those commemorated can be found at https://sprawiedliwi.dsh.waw.pl .