March of Remembrance marks Warsaw Ghetto liquidation anniversary
A March of Remembrance commemorating the victims of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto was held in central Warsaw on Monday.
This year's march started at the Umschlagplatz, the deportation site from where Jews were sent to their death in German concentration camps, mainly to the infamous Treblinka extermination camp, one of the main extermination sites for European Jews.
Seventy-seven years ago, on July 22, 1942, the Germans began a massive deportation operation, known by its German name as Gross-Aktion Warschau. It was a component of the wider Operation Reinhard, a secretive plan as part of which the Nazis murdered more than 1.5 million Polish citizens of Jewish descent in the General Government district of occupied Poland during WWII. Within two months, 254,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were deported to Treblinka, 11,000 were sent to labour camps, and about 6,000 were shot on the spot.
The Warsaw ghetto was established on October 12, 1940. A German decree required all Polish Jews from Warsaw to move into a designated area which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city with a brick wall in November 1940. At its peak, the ghetto's population reached over 400,000 Polish citizens of Jewish descent. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of those established by the Germans in occupied Poland during WWII.
The march, that led to the house of pre-war Jewish poet Władysław Szlengel, was attended, among others, by historian and journalist, survivor of the Łódź Ghetto and two extermination camps Marian Turski and the Ambassador of Israel to Poland Anna Azari as well as the Director of the Jewish Historical Institute Paweł Śpiewak.