A PICTORIAL REMEMBRANCE

Availability: 4-6 weeks
Rental Fee: $3,000 plus insurance and roundtrip shipping
Contact: Fran Sternberg (913-327-8194 or program@mchekc.org)

Description:
Created by the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, 125 framed black-and-white photographs of life in the Warsaw Ghetto from 1940-43 with descriptive placards; good for school and community groups.

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Jewish community of Warsaw was the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world. It numbered some 375,000 souls, and its roots in Poland extended back to the 15th century.

In 1940, on October 12, Yom Kippur, the Nazis ordered the official establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto. Within weeks, the ghetto was sealed off from the rest of the world by a brick wall, 9.8 feet high, topped with barbed wire and shards of broken glass. Within months, the ghetto population swelled to 450,000, as the Nazis forced Jews from the surrounding communities into it.

Ghetto life was a constant confrontation with death: a struggle against insuperable odds – chaotic overcrowding, debilitating starvation, rampant disease, exhausting labor, and disabling isolation – exacerbated by harsh prohibitions against every conceivable activity – communal prayer, public education, cultural and political gatherings, manufacture and trade of consumer goods, and any attempts to augment the food supply. Survival demanded unflagging resourcefulness and heroic reserves of spiritual resistance.

APPROXIMATE SIZES
71 large pieces (36" x 20"), 36 medium pieces (20" x 16"), 14 small pieces (11" x 15")
2 mural size pieces (55" x 70"), 2 mural size pieces (123" x 70")

"They love life, and they do not wish to disappear from the earth before their time…Say what you wish, this will of ours to live in the midst of terrible calamity is the outward manifestation of a certain hidden power whose quality has not yet been examined. It is a wondrous, superlative power…We are left naked, but as long as this secret power is still within us, we do not give up hope. And the strength of this power…is rooted in our eternal tradition that commands us to live."

Chaim A. Kaplan
Warsaw Ghetto
March 10, 1940