At the cemetery at Okopowa Street in Warsaw, an openwork monument with stones suspended in the air was erected. The Jewish religious community announced the completion of works of commemoration of Jews who died or were murdered by the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto and were buried in one of the largest mass graves in Europe.

In the press release, the community recalled that in the first months of the German occupation, burials of Jews who died in the capital took place in individual graves, in accordance with Jewish tradition and law. Later, when dozens and hundreds of people died in the Warsaw ghetto every day, they began to be buried in a mass grave at the Jewish cemetery at Okopowa Street. Historians estimate that tens of thousands of nameless victims were buried there in two pits.

Last summer, the community board and the Cultural Heritage Foundation decided to commemorate the victims on the mass grave’s spot, within the limits indicated in 2021 by Dr Sebastian Różycki from the Department of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Systems of the Warsaw University of Technology. The design of the monument was prepared by a team of architects from the Archiworks company: Karol Dzik, Maciej Szpalerski and Krzysztof Matuszewski.

Between the two excavations, they erected an openwork monument with stones suspended in the air, arranged in the shape of a broken column, which symbolizes an interrupted life. Below there is a commemorative plate with an inscription created in the 1960s.

The boundaries of the graves were marked with corten walls, between which boulders and stones were placed, symbolizing the thousands of Jews murdered by the Germans in the Warsaw ghetto. As indicated by the representatives of the community, the commemoration does not affect the shape of the historic cemetery and creates the background for historical tombstones. Its size should make people aware of the enormity of the mass grave.

The cost of the creation of the commemoration is PLN 1.3 million. All works were financed from the funds of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the “War graves and cemeteries in the country” program, as well as the Jewish Community in Warsaw.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński