Gallery 7: Holocaust, 1939-1944
The Warsaw ghetto was the largest of the more than 600 ghettos in occupied Poland not only in size but also in population, with 450,000 Jews trapped there over the course of its existence from October 1940 until May 1943. Adam Czerniaków and Emanuel Ringelblum, whose diaries are quoted on the walls, are your guides. Czerniaków was the chairman of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council, which the Germans created to run the ghetto and carry out its orders. Ringelblum, a historian, created a secret archive, Oyneg Shabes, to document every aspect of the struggle to survive in the Warsaw ghetto. Those documents, which were created on the spot and in the moment are the basis for presenting the Warsaw ghetto.