Warsaw honors ghetto victims
July 22, 2012
The liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto began on July 22, 1942, and led ultimately to the vasty majority of the city's Jewish community being sent to the death camp Treblinka.
The event, organized by the Jewish Historical Institute, saw hundreds from Poland's Jewish community and other Poles pay tribute to the Holocaust victims.
A march in remembrance of the victims retraced the route that pediatrician Janusz Korczak took, along with 200 children from his ghetto orphanage, to the spot where Jews were deported from Warsaw. Korczak was killed in Treblinka along with the children.
Participants carried ribbons with the names of murdered Jewish children, and some were left blank to honor the ghetto's anonymous victims.
This was the first time the start of deportations has been commemorated in Poland.
In November 1940, Nazi Germany walled off four square kilometers in Warsaw to isolate the city's Jews. Disease and starvation claimed the lives of 100,000 inside the ghetto up to the point when the deportations began in July 1942.
Those who escaped deporation went on to stage an uprising in the ghetto in April 1943. They fought the Nazis for three weeks, but some 7,000 Jews were killed during the uprsising.
tm/ng (AFP, AP, dpa)