The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, together with the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research, is inviting visitors from 18 April 2023 to 8 January 2024 to the exhibition “Around Us a Sea of Fire. The Fate of Jewish Civilians During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”, which will be part of the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

On 19 April 1943, the Germans began the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. Several hundred fighters of the Jewish underground responded with armed resistance. 

„The remaining inhabitants of the ghetto, some 50,000 ‘civilian’ Jews, hid in shelters and bunkers for weeks. Their silent resistance was just as important as the armed fight. For many days they remained elusive – they went underground and disobeyed orders from the Germans. The exhibition presents them, the ‘elusive’ ghetto inhabitants” emphasises the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The exhibition will show what daily life was like in the bunker, what conditions the Jewish lived in and with whom they shared the hiding space, how they coped with routine activities and needs. 

It will also tell the visitors about the formation of relationships between people in hiding and their feelings and emotions. On the one hand, they felt conflicts, fear, moments of panic, lack of hope, the abandonment and indifference of the world to their fate and the awareness of a lost life, and on the other hand, the need for love, closeness, and causality, taking responsibility for others. The desire to live, to save themselves and their loved ones, to create a community whose members support and protect each other, is also one way of resisting evil.

The main material in the exhibition will be testimonies of Jews hiding in bunkers in the ghetto and beyond, on the Aryan side. All other objects, memorabilia have been destroyed. That is why words have a special power and function in this exhibition.

Adrian Andrzejewski