The Warsaw Ghetto Testimonies cabinet shows the moment when the vibrant area of the northern district was transformed into the sea of ruins that Warsaw became during the Second World War. The exhibition juxtaposes two extreme perspectives - from inside the ghetto and from beyond its borders. Photographs taken by German soldiers from international archives are shown alongside images of ghetto inhabitants and members of the resistance. Together with a few objects excavated from underground, they make up a moving story about the creation of the ghetto, its functioning, the uprising, its liquidation and the permanence of the place after it.

Ghetto history as part of Warsaw's history
The exhibition Testimonies from the Warsaw Ghetto attempts to show the unimaginable. It covers the time from the German occupation and the demarcation of the "typhoid-prone area" in Warsaw in the spring of 1940 to the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1948. The depiction of everyday life in the ghetto is made possible by the many different perspectives - those of soldiers and members of the resistance, men and women, amateurs and professionals. Their photographs are not only a universal story about the war, but also allow us to get in touch with that reality from different points of view and look at post-war Warsaw from a temporal distance. The objects unearthed during the search, which belonged to the inhabitants of the northern district, are material signs of the life of the community that inhabited the northern part of Warsaw for almost 200 years. The exhibition closes with a film, which is also the only source of light in the exhibition. The documentary, recorded by a handful of Survivors just after the war, shows the site of the ghetto - the desert that emerged after the annihilation of the entire Jewish community - a symbol of its Holocaust.

'Typhoid-prone area'. Closure of the Jewish quarter
Before the outbreak of World War II, the Jewish community accounted for 30% of all Warsaw's inhabitants, most of them living in the northern district. The bustling streets of Nalewki, Chłodna or Krochmalna were the centre of the Jewish world, which nowhere achieved such diversity - social, religious or political. Within a few years, this world ceased to exist.

Demarcated in the spring of 1940 by the administration of the occupying German Reich in Poland, the Seuchensperrgebiet, or "typhoid-prone area", was already isolated by a wall from the rest of the city in the autumn of the same year. Almost 350,000 people were confined to the ghetto. The dramatic conditions meant that the Jewish community, both on an individual and community level, had to face death on a daily basis.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The great liquidation action began in 1942. As a result of mass deportations of the population to the Treblinka extermination camp, the ghetto was almost completely abandoned, and in 1943 the area of the northern district was completely razed to the ground. At dawn on 19 April, SS troops entered the Warsaw Ghetto through the gate on Nalewki Street. The fighters attacked them by surprise, firing shots from rooftops, from attics, from positions near the windows of houses at the junction of Nalewki, Gęsia, Zamenhofa, Miła and Muranowski Square. People were hiding in shelters prepared in advance. The Germans did not expect such an attitude from the insurgents. Although the heaviest fighting lasted only a few days, the ghetto inhabitants resisted for a month. Unable to break it, the Germans turned the ghetto into a sea of ruins and ruins. Thousands of people were deported to Treblinka and camps at Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki.

"We who survived".
After the fall of the uprising, the Germans began the methodical destruction of the entire ghetto area. As a result, the former northern district practically disappeared completely from the face of Warsaw. The ghetto was burnt down and the entire Jewish community was annihilated, with only ruins, stumps of houses and, in the northern part, empty space remaining. The exhibition shows probably the only surviving film from that period. The documentary Mir, lebngeblibene (We the survivors), made immediately after the war, shows what escapes the imagination - the staggering extent of the national catastrophe after which the Jewish community tried to return to a normal life in the socialist reality. The shots of the landscape of ruins reaching to the horizon are accompanied by the prayer El Male Rachamim (God full of mercy) imposing on the survivors the injunction to cherish the memory of the absent.

What's left of the Warsaw Ghetto
After the liberation of Warsaw in 1945, the Warsaw Ghetto did not disappear from sight; the ruins of Warsaw were a reminder of the crimes committed. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became an important part of the collective memory of the Holocaust, and the memory of the fighters and martyrs was an imperative for those who survived. However, the initial hopes of the Jewish community for the reconstruction of the northern district proved to be faint. In 1948, with the celebration of the 5th anniversary of the uprising, the idea of reviving a Jewish quarter in Warsaw came to an end and thus the history of Polish Jewry came to an end. Soon the state of Israel would be established and the ghetto desert would become a new district - the Muranów estate.

Few testimonies
In Muranów, which was built on the ruins of the ghetto after the war, it is difficult to find material traces of the Jewish life that once existed there. Objects now hidden deep underground are being brought to light during archaeological research. The search for the Ringelblum Archive and the archives of the left-wing Zionist party Bund in the former ghetto ended in failure. The few artefacts unearthed during the excavations are testimony to the pre-war, occupation and uprising daily life of the Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw, which took place in the basement shelters. Some of the documents, fragments of crockery, forks and buttons found are displayed in the study among other visual testimonies of the life of the community that inhabited this part of Warsaw for almost 200 years, and of which only a handful of Survivors remain.

The cabinet is located on the basement level, where it completes the story of the city and its inhabitants during the Second World War. It fills the gap left by the scarcity of testimonies of the life of the Jewish population in other parts of the main exhibition. The exhibition draws on the collections of the Museum of Warsaw, the Jewish Historical Institute, the Filmoteka Narodowa Audiovisual Institute and other institutions.