Statement From the Editors

Summary

The bustling, commercial, overcrowded and noisy Warsaw described in the special section of this issue of POLIN exists no more. Physically, it was destroyed by the bombardments of 1939, the demolition of the ghetto area after the uprising of April-May 1943 and the systematic German destruction which followed the insurrection of August and September 1944. The heroic effort at rebuilding Warsaw in the post-war period concentrated on the pre-industrial sections of the city. Nineteenth century architecture was regarded as of little value and not only were the old central areas of the town rebuilt in an entirely new style, but some important nineteenth century buildings, like the Kronenberg Palace were, in fact, demolished.

The Warsaw of today has a quite different appearance from that of the town of 1939, as is clearly demonstrated in Peter Martyn's account of the development of Warsaw in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The losses in population have been even more devastating. Polish losses in Warsaw from the September campaign, the consequences of sustained Nazi terror and from the 1944 uprising probably amount to overt million. Jewish losses have been even greater. As a consequence of the Nazi policies of mass murder, whose character emerges clearly from Professor Marian Drozdowski's chilling description of the reports of Ludwig Fischer, German governor of the Warsaw district during the occupation, barely a few thousand of the nearly 400,000Jews ofpre-1939 Warsaw, ‘the mothercity oflsrael’ and the largest] ewish settlement in Europe, survived the war. It was not without justification that Jacob Shatzky, the historian of Warsaw whose career is movingly described in this issue by Robert Shapiro, could write in 1956 ‘For whom am I slaving? For whom am I writing and about whom? My people is dead, my theme is a dead one and I am dead-tired?'

In recent years, valiant efforts have been made to disprove his bitter words. New monuments have been erected on the Umschlagplatz, from which the overwhelming majority of Warsaw Jews were sent to the death camp of Treblinka, and in the ghetto; the Nozick synagogue has been restored and much has been undertaken to preserve the two great Jewish cemeteries in Warsaw, on Okopowa Street and in Bródno (Praga).