Jewish Cemetery

Audrey and I went along to the Jewish Cemetery this afternoon (Amy had to go and meet the President!). It’s long been on our list of places to see in Warsaw but it’s not that easy to get to by public transport (my feet now hurt from walking!). I thought we’d make a special effort though as we’ve only got just over a week left in town.

The cemetery was established in 1806 and spreads over a considerably large area of Warsaw with around 150,000 gravestones still surviving. Almost all of Poland’s 3 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during WWII meaning that relatives no longer survive to tend the graves of their families. This was followed by the Communists disregard for Jews after the War which means that much of the cemetery has gone uncared for over 40 years. Attention has been paid recently to reclaiming the cemetery from nature, but still a lot of it is overgrown by trees and undergrowth making for a rather sad monument to Jewish Warsaw.

Thousands of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were buried here in un-marked graves, but there are graves and tombs for some notable Jews including Adam Czerniakow chairman of the Judenrat (d. 1942), Janusz Korczak (d. 1944) and the inventor of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhof (d. 1917). Try and get along if you’re near the centre Warsaw and have a spare couple of hours.

The grave of Ludwik Zamenhof