The Heart of the City That Once Was

Human memory is a curious phenomenon. Some events stay with us for the rest of our lives, while others are fleeting as an inconsequential thought. Sometimes, however, evoked by a specific trigger, these old memories return, merge with new ones, and become a different thing altogether. 

I only vaguely remember my great-grandfather Józef Gitler-Barski as an elderly man I would visit every now and then. The strongest memory I have of him is the day after his death. I cannot recall when or how I found out about it, I either didn’t go to his funeral – I was just six years old – or it didn’t register in my mind at all. But I do remember a friend in kindergarten asking me why I was sad – and it was precisely because my great-grandfather had passed away. Afterwards, he disappeared from my thoughts and my memory; he was just another grave on which you would place a pebble on All Saints’ Day. 

All this changed when I started working at the Jewish Historical Institute. Here, the memories of my great-grandfather would pop up at every corner. He would appear in photos and documents, as an author of articles published in the Jewish History Quarterly, journals, and handwritten testimonies from the Holocaust, during which he stayed in the ghetto and in several camps. I had been told these stories before. But it is one thing to listen to a story and another thing entirely to piece it together from archival materials, documents, and photos. 

My great-grandfather’s story would lend itself well to an adventure movie script. I’m not going to get into details here – his life cannot be boiled down to the 2,000 characters I have been allotted for this text (believe me, I’ve tried). What you need to know is that he survived the war and devoted his life to building and rebuilding Jewish culture in Poland.  

In the photo shown as part of the exhibition, he is pictured in the foreground, pointing at something. He is standing among a sea of ruins, but I like to imagine that he is pointing to a future in which Warsaw is once again the beating heart of Jewish life. 

If you would like to find out more about my great-grandfather’s wartime experiences, you can read one of his articles or testimonies: 

Likwidacja getta warszawskiego (Relacja świadka) [Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto (Witness Testimony)]

„Aufenthaltslager” – Bergen-Belsen. Dziennik więźnia [“Aufenthaltslager” – Bergen-Belsen. Prisoner’s Journal]

Testimony of Józef Gitler-Barski: https://cbj.jhi.pl/documents/1282341/0/, https://cbj.jhi.pl/documents/1281591/0/ 

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

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Supported by Norway and EEA Grants from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway and the national budget #EEAGrants #Funduszenorweskie #EOG #EEANorwayGrants