My Guide Website?
Umschlagplatz
On 18 April 1988, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the outbreak of theWarsaw Ghetto Uprising, a stone monument resembling an open freight car was unveiled to mark the Umschlagplatz. The inscription on four commemorative plaques in Polish,Yiddish, English and Hebrew reads Along this path of suffering and death over 300 000 Jews were driven in 1942-1943 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps. The 400 most popular Jewish-Polish first names, in alphabetical order from Aba to Żanna, are engraved on the monument. Each one commemorates 1,000 victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The gate is surmounted by a syenite grave stone (donated by the government and society of Sweden) with a motif of a shattered forest – a symbol of the extermination of the Jewish nation. The selection and sequence of colours of the monument (white with the black stripe on the front wall) refer to the Jewish ritual clothing.
The monument was created by architect Hanna Szmalenberg and sculptor Władysław Klamerus. It replaced a commemorative plaque unveiled in the late 1940s. In 2002 the monument site and the adjacent school buildings were listed in the Register of Historic Monuments