A memorial dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising was found vandalized with red paint on Friday.
“Such acts are an attack on history and the values that unite us as a society,” the Polish foreign ministry declared on X.
Located outside Warsaw’s Polin Museum, the 11-meter memorial marks hallowed ground where Jewish resistance fighters once waged an unprecedented battle against Nazi forces.
The Warsaw ghetto, opened in October 1940, crammed up to 450,000 Jews into a mere three square kilometers of Poland’s capital. Nazi forces had sealed off the district with brick walls topped with barbed wire, creating what would become the largest Jewish ghetto in German-occupied Europe.
Inside, more than nine people lived in each room on average, with families surviving on official rations of just 184 calories per day. Disease, particularly typhus, ravaged the population in these squalid conditions, with bodies often lying unburied in the streets. Still, even as starvation and disease ran rampant, the Jewish prisoners maintained their humanity through secret schools and religious services.
By April 1943, facing imminent deportation to death camps, some 750 Jewish fighters led by 23-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz chose resistance over surrender. Armed with smuggled weapons and crude explosives, they launched their uprising on Passover eve, stunning German forces who expected only passive victims.
The uprising ended brutally on May 16, 1943, when SS General Jurgen Stroop ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street as a symbol of victory. Nazi forces had methodically burned and bombed the ghetto block by block, forcing fighters into bunkers and sewers. Around 7,000 Jews died during the fighting, while approximately 7,000 more were captured and deported to Treblinka and another 42,000 survivors were sent to labor camps.
Anielewicz and many of his fellow fighters died in their command bunker when they were cornered by Nazi forces. Some fighters, like Marek Edelman and Zivia Lubetkin, escaped through the sewers with help from the Polish underground.
Stroop’s official report, known as “The Stroop Report,” boasted of capturing 56,065 Jews and destroying 631 bunkers. He infamously titled his report “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More.”.
Israel’s ambassador to Warsaw, Yacov Livne, called for authorities to “find the culprits and bring them to justice,” noting that this isn’t the first antisemitic attack on the sacred memorial. By Saturday, AFP reports the paint had been removed and police have opened an investigation.
