German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier asked “forgiveness” Wednesday for “the crimes” of his compatriots, during the ceremonies of the 80th anniversary of the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto destroyed by the German Nazis.
The first German head of state to deliver a speech in front of the monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, during the anniversary, President Steinmeier first issued an address in Yiddish, a language once spoken by Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, “that the Germans wanted to eradicate”, to call for such a disaster never to happen again.
“I stand before you today and ask your forgiveness for the crimes that Germans have committed here,” Steinmeier said afterwards.
An hour before, municipal alarm sirens and church bells in Warsaw sounded to mark the start of the commemorations of the revolt, which broke out on April 19, 1943 and was the biggest and best-known fact of the resistance. against the Nazis during World War II, when several hundred Jewish fighters attacked the Nazis to die at gunpoint rather than in an extermination camp.
Mr. Steinmeier and his Israeli counterparts Isaac Herzog and Polish Andrzej Duda, laid wreaths in front of the monument, opposite the Polin Museum of the History of the Jews of Poland, located on the site of many clashes during the uprising.
“We must remember this. The memory of the Holocaust is neither postmodernist nor relative. Then appeared the absolute evil personified by the Nazis and their aides. It was also the absolute good personified by the victims and the combatants” , underlined Mr. Herzog.
In this highly symbolic place, the German head of state strongly criticized Vladimir Putin who “violated international law, questioned borders, committed land theft”. “This war is bringing immeasurable suffering, violence, destruction and death to the people of Ukraine,” he said.
In the afternoon, the three presidents went to the Nozyk synagogue in Warsaw, the only one in the Polish capital to have survived the war.
During the visit, the three heads of state lit “candles of memory”, the Polish presidency said in a tweet.
Across the city, as in years past, more than three thousand volunteers handed out paper daffodils for people to hang on their jackets and coats, in remembrance of Marek Edelman, the last commander of the Jewish uprising, who died in 2009 , who used to mark each anniversary of the uprising by laying a bouquet of these yellow flowers alone at the foot of the memorial.
By color and shape, the daffodils recall the yellow star whose wearing was imposed on the Jews by the Nazis.
Leaflets briefly recalling the history of the uprising, in Polish, Ukrainian and English, accompanied the daffodils. This year, the tradition has spread to other cities in the country.
“We intend to distribute together 450,000 paper flowers. This number symbolizes that of Jewish women and men locked up in the Warsaw ghetto at the time of the greatest overcrowding, in the spring of 1941″, explained to journalists Zofia Bojanczyk, coordinator of the project ” Daffodils”.
A year after invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis marked out an area in Warsaw to crowd into three square kilometers almost half a million Jews, to exterminate them by starvation and disease, and to deport more 300,000 to gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp, 80 kilometers east of the capital.
The Warsaw ghetto was the largest of all the ghettos during World War II.
At the time of the outbreak of the insurrection by a few hundred Jewish fighters, around 50,000 civilians were still hiding in cellars and bunkers in the ghetto.
About seven thousand people were killed during the fighting while six thousand others died following the fires started methodically by the Nazis throughout the district, which immediately became a field of ruins. The survivors were sent to camps.
Many events of all kinds, meetings with survivors, concerts, film screenings, theatrical performances, have been planned this year to mark the anniversary, highlighting in particular the point of view of civilians, especially women.
At the Kordegarda gallery, a collection of everyday objects, unearthed during various works, tells how the Jews of Warsaw lived, loved and died during the war.
Photos of the ghetto, taken by a Polish firefighter and recently discovered, will be part of an exhibition at the Polin Museum, while until now most of the known shots were taken by the Nazis and depicted the Jewish quarter through the eyes of the Germans.
19/04/2023 20:49:34 – Warsaw (AFP) © 2023 AFP
