WARSAW, Poland — Two sections of the wall that isolated the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II should be added to a list of historical monuments, a regional conservation official in Poland says Tuesday.
A proposal to list the red brick wall still standing at 53 Sienna Street says the barrier should be protected as a witness to history and preserved for future generations.
A fragment of the former Warsaw Ghetto wall on Sienna 53 street that a regional official for preservation of historical sites wants put on a list of protected historical monuments, in Warsaw, Poland, on February 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
It says monument status would give legal protection to a “unique historical memento, priceless to the Jewish and the Polish nation.”
The wall was built in 1940, when the Nazi Germans occupying Poland closed the area of Warsaw they called the “Jewish district.” It was four meters (13 feet) high, including one meter of barbed wire on top.
Most of the ghetto’s 450,000 residents died of hunger and disease there, or in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp.
The Germans destroyed the ghetto and most of the wall in 1943. Hundreds of residents resisted, but the Ghetto Uprising was crushed in May 1943 and almost all its fighters were killed.
— AP
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