Mur Getta

From what I could see, the onetime borders of the Ghetto
are now delineated with markers like this that run the
length of the Ghetto

This last Wednesday I had an impromptu trip through part of the Warsaw Ghetto.  It was a very sobering experience to read the markers which detail briefly the number of people forced to live in the Ghetto, and the numbers of people who were subsequently and systematically killed by Nazi forces at one concentration camp or another.  Unfortunately, the pictures I snapped were on an old phone that I have inherited, not my own excellent phone's camera or my new little red camera, so the quality is not what it could be.  Nor do my photos do justice to the weight of the streets I was walking or the history I was visiting.  Over the last few weeks I have reveled over the majesty and grandeur of this great city and its beauty; this week I finally came face to face with the other side of Warsaw, the heartbreakingly painful truth of its own history.  I have not visited its many museums yet, but I do know that a large majority of Warsaw was destroyed during World War II and that so many of the beautiful buildings that I've been delighting in are new, simply designed to replicate their destroyed predecessors.  Beyond this, though, is the even more devastating fact that during the war the Jewish population of Warsaw was rounded up and quartered within the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto.  The Ghetto, as I learned Wednesday, was actually in two parts, the Large Ghetto and the Small Ghetto, and the two were connected by a small footbridge.  I won't attempt to synthesize a brief history of the Warsaw Ghetto, at least not at this time.  There are many, many sites online that can detail with greater clarity and accuracy than I the history and significance of this Ghetto and its role during the war.  But I will post here my photos, and when I have the opportunity to return, and to visit the Uprising Museum, I will update my photos again.

For now, I will say that I am still infatuated with my new city, but, like a woman who finally realizes that her lover has had a long and tumultuous past, I am confronted with my city's past and it has shaken me a bit, changed me in a way that neither pyramids and sacrificial altars in Mexico nor drinks on pallets on the Wisła could.

Off to one side of the footbridge that connected the Large Ghetto
with the Small Ghetto is this small memorial, which includes a topographical
map of the Ghetto, and a few brief details about the Warsaw Ghetto and its people's
fate during and after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943

This is the site of the wooden footbridge that connected the Large Ghetto with the
Small Ghetto.  Like so much of Warsaw, the bridge itself did not survive the war,
but where it once stood is this memorial.  There are two towers with pictures of the
bridge around their bases.  Just behind this bridge tower are a few viewfinders where
visitors may look at four pictures of the Ghetto and the bridge as it stood in 1942

The opposite side of the bridge