Location: Warsaw, Poland
Planned year of opening: 2027
Size: 3,493 m²
Investor: Warsaw Ghetto Museum

A story of a crime that was meant to be forgotten.

During World War II, the Germans had concrete plans for Warsaw and its Jewish population. As early as 1939, after the occupation of Warsaw, the idea of creating a ghetto emerged. As a result, almost half of the population of Poland’s capital was forced to live there.

In the following months, further communities of Polish Jews from other parts of the country were transported into the newly created “Jewish district”. At its peak, more than 400,000 people coexisted on less than 4 km². Robbed of human dignity, plundered, starved and forced into hard labour, they tried to survive a nightmare they could not believe until the end. The full range of human experience, recorded among other sources in the Ringelblum Archive, was compressed into those three short years of the Warsaw Ghetto – the world’s largest concentration of Jewish population during the war.

The story of this crime against the Jews, and of the great heroism of a community’s attempt to survive – culminating in the uprising – is the main narrative axis of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum now being created.

We had the honour of working with outstanding specialists and historians developing the Museum’s script, in order to create the arrangement and design the spaces for a message that matters for Poland, for the Warsaw that is no more, and for people who often departed into oblivion.

The Warsaw Ghetto Museum will be an extraordinary place – a place where this memory will come alive. As one of the few Holocaust museums, it will be located in the city where the Holocaust took place in its most brutal form. The Museum is housed in the former Bersohn and Bauman Children’s Hospital, a building that survived the inferno of war and the destruction of Poland’s capital.

The hospital was founded by affluent Jewish families more than 50 years before the war for the children of Warsaw, regardless of denomination. Within its walls the first cases of starvation disease were studied, with children treated on the hospital terrace. Here doctors conducted research and wrote the first chapters of the medical study “Starvation Disease”.

In this cruel history the building plays a metaphysical role, becoming a symbol of the survival of matter and memory. As one of Warsaw’s rare remnants, it survived almost intact the bombing of the city and its annihilation during the Warsaw Uprising.

It is precisely this survival of memory of the people who perished in the ghetto, and of the bonds that united the citizens of pre-war Warsaw, that forms the substance of the exhibition, based largely on original artefacts and archival materials. They are complemented by authentic witness accounts, preserved thanks to Emanuel Ringelblum’s archive. These accounts, like nothing else, through contact with the person described, show how enormous a loss we suffered, how monstrous a crime was committed.

The story of the ghetto is one of the most difficult and painful precisely because it is so well documented. Every voice recalls a human being and their suffering; every fragment of found, cracked or destroyed porcelain tells of a family home broken apart, of plunder and the ruthless extermination of its owners. We wish to enrich this true and difficult message with a symbolic narrative that will release the complex emotions connected with the Warsaw Ghetto.

The exhibition is divided into two parts: one is located on the hospital grounds, where the visit begins. Part of its cellars connects with newly built underground floors, where we tell the darkest part of the story, up to the liquidation of the ghetto and of the Jewish community in Poland.

The means of expression used to create the narrative are primarily archives and the voices of witnesses, but also the precise lighting of exhibits and sounds that lead us from the weather of the pre-war capital into the darkness of the Holocaust.