Warsaw – Warsaw Ghetto (Leszno Street and Żelazna Street)
I’ve tracked a lot of the Warsaw ghetto wall, but I can’t remember seeing this specific signage before and as the sign says, this is where the Leszno Street entrance to the ghetto was located. The Warsaw Ghetto was established by by the Nazis following German occupation and the area was formally sealed on 16 November 16 1940. There were initially 350,000 Jews walled into the ghetto, but that number soon increased to 460,000 as deportees from other areas arrived in the city.
These maps are located in numerous places across the city, over-laying the location of the ghetto onto the current street plan. Leszno Street was one of the major pre-war streets enclosed within the initial ghetto boundaries established in November 1940. When the ghetto was effectively split into two sections (the “Small Ghetto” south of Chłodna Street and the “Large Ghetto” to the north) following boundary adjustments in late 1941 and early 1942, notably the exclusion of a section west of Żelazna Street between Leszno and Grzybowska Streets, Leszno Street remained a key east-west axis within the Large Ghetto.
The incredible web-site at https://getto.pl/en gives a clear indication of what is happening here.
What the area looks like today, with the line of the ghetto wall visible on the pavement of Żelazna Street.
There’s the line of the former ghetto.
The crossing today and, as ever, it’s very hard to try and envision what this area looked like in the early 1940s.
