The Heart of the City That Once Was

A busy intersection, an entrance to a building, a long stone wall which in this particular spot is a divider between the Warsaw of the living and the Warsaw of the dead. The people in the photo are in a rush not unfamiliar to us today: they are lawyers, clients, passers-by. An eerie liminal space between two worlds, an opening with a double role, like the closet leading to Narnia. How many of the people captured in motion are aware of the other function of these stairs and doors? Will some of them eventually come to use them? 

Court building in Leszno Street, designed by Bohdan Pniewski. On the side of Leszno, it is the ghetto, and on the side of Biała Street – the other, “Aryan” side, as the occupying forces call it. Inside the edifice there is a labyrinth of kilometres-long corridors. If you have friends on the other side and a bit of courage and luck, you can get lost among them, take off your clothes, remove the stigma, shed your skin. Or at least see your long unseen relatives or friends, have a word with them, exchange glances and objects. 

It is one of those photos where what you don’t see is more important than what you do. Behind the doors, in those corridors, witnessed by temporarily blind officers of the law, a silent exchange takes place: bread, money, life. Maybe at the same time that somebody pressed the shutter button, somebody else was walking assuredly along the court building wall, stepping on the pavement flattened everyday by countless heels – a friend of Pniewski, Bohdan Lachert, who would go on to design Muranów, a housing estate doubling as a monument to the ghetto, whose blocks of flats now stand on the other side of the street. They are walking together through one gate and leaving through another. The boy will survive the war. His father, Maksymilian Goldberg, will die in the ghetto. 

“Justice is the mainstay of the power and stability of the Republic of Poland” – this quote from Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski is placed over the entrance. The edifice was opened in June 1939. At the time, it was the largest court building in Europe. Pniewski was fascinated with Italy, and his design was inspired by Mussolini-era modernism. Were it true that the more monumental the architecture, the more powerful the state, we would surely have been a superpower like them. Three months later, the war broke out, and a year and a half after that Leszno Street was incorporated into the ghetto. The statue of Themis with a blindfold is standing at the side as people are exchanging wares or using banknotes to buy either goods or freedom from the armband. 

In our digital repository, the object can be viewed in the highest quality.

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