After their occupation of Poland in 1939, the Nazis created the largest Jewish ghetto in Europe in Warsaw, which held as many as 400,000 people, locked within thirty miles of walls, barriers, and wire.

By June of 1942, 100,000 had died in what was a constant attrition to Nazis violence, starvation, forced labor, and disease. This attrition was part of the Nazis’ plan for emptying the ghetto.

In addition, between June and September of 1942, the Nazis transported over a quarter of a million Jews from the ghetto to Treblinka, where all were murdered.

The remaining 50,000 to 60,000 in the ghetto tended to be young and comparatively healthy. Many were now completely bereft of family and knew what fate deportation held for them. They began planning to resist the final liquidation of the ghetto.

Disparate groups within the ghetto united under the command of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa), replaced the Judenrat as the controlling local authority, accumulated weapons from outside, and constructed bunkers.

Different interpretations and accounts give different starting dates for the beginning of the uprising and its ending, but suffice it to say that the Nazis had allocated three days for their final deportation of all inhabitants in the ghetto. They were shocked by the resistance, which led to the replacing of the German commandant in change. It took between a month and six weeks before they had burned people out of the buildings and bunkers, regained control, and destroyed the ghetto.

The leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization, Mordechaj Anielewicz, wrote, “What’s most important: the dream of my life has become a reality. I have lived to see Jewish resistance in the Ghetto in all its greatness and glory.” The quote is at the end of a longer letter to Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of his unit commanders.

The men and women who took part in the uprising had no illusions about the final outcome, but they believed that their actions would have a powerful symbolic and psychological impact.

Nathan Rapoport was a Jewish sculptor from Warsaw who escaped to the Soviet Union when the Nazis stormed Poland. Recognizing his talent, the Soviets supplied him with a studio and materials and put him to work making statues of working class “heroes” prior to the Soviet’s entry into the war.

Rapoport’s experiences in the Soviet Union during the war included forced labor as well as creating art. At the end of the war, he was repatriated to Warsaw and given the commission of sculpting a memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (which ultimately became the larger and more important front of the memorial) and for the ghetto’s deported and murdered Jews (which was represented in a smaller bas–relief on the back of the memorial.)

It would be difficult to exaggerate the challenge that Rapoport faced. It was very close in time to the actual events and the end of the war, and the enormity of civilian death and destruction had no precedents. Rafael Lemkin had only recently coined the word “genocide.”

As the front and back division of the memorial indicates, conveying the courage embodied in the uprising was Rapoport ’s dominant goal. It remained within the context of the staggering loss of life that the Warsaw Ghetto also represented.

Rapoport had trained as an artist in Paris and Italy, as well as in Poland. In Paris he was exposed to Cubism, Expressionism, and abstract art; in Italy, to the classical sculpture that was much closer to his own work.

Non-representational modes of art had replaced the human forms that Rapoport had sculpted before the war and in the Soviet Union. The art world was dominated at the end of the war by very different aesthetic values and perspectives. In a letter, he summed up his dilemma: was he expected to chisel a hole in a rock and assert, voila, the courage of the Jewish people?

He felt that the memorial had to be representational, had to have human figures in it. In spite of the fact that he was moving against the mainstream of contemporary thought on memorialization and art, as well as against the domination of abstraction in art, he followed his own council.

It is important to question how Nathan Rapoport sought to capture the courage and the sense of purpose of the ghetto inhabitants who fought back against the Nazis with only the assurance of death.

Look at the photograph of the memorial on the right for a moment. The central figure, facing forward with his right arm bent before him, is meant to be Mordechaj Anielewicz. In his left hand, he is carrying a torch, a symbol of his role in igniting rebellion against Nazi tyranny and atrocities.

Take time to study an oversized and more detailed picture of the figures.

Compare and contrast the actual Mordechaj Anielewicz with Rapoport’s depiction of him in the memorial. Take a look at him in this photograph from the ghetto. You can also find a photograph of Anielewicz by going to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website and searching for him in the photographs collection.

Artists use the forms, the materials, the set of attributes, and the aesthetic models that they have been taught to convey such emotions as courage.

To capture and express the courage and heroism that he recognized in the uprising, how did Rapoport feel that he needed to change Mordechaj Anielewicz through art? Why did he feel that he needed to transform Mordechaj Anielewicz as he did?

Women played an active role in the uprising. How are they portrayed in the memorial?

Would it be possible to pick up the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, strip it of its text, move it to another country, and have it memorialize an entirely different foreign event? Could the front of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial become a memorial to French resistance fighters or Soviet citizens fighting fascism?

For an excellent and in–depth discussion of the uprising, Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, and Nathan Rapoport’s approach, see James Young’s The Texture of Memory, Holocaust Memorials and Memory, pp. 155-184.

Also see our resources (use the menu above in the right window), along with this late addition, a list of related documents.