A tourist trail tracing the boundary of the former Warsaw ghetto was inaugurated in the Polish capital Wednesday, honouring the memory of the 450,000 Jews from the city killed by the occupying Nazis.
Twenty-one commemorative plaques bearing photographs from the period have been installed at key points along the trail, although few vestiges of the ghetto remain today.
"The Warsaw ghetto was the largest to be set up in Poland during the Nazi occupation. It was a horrific place of isolation and death for a third of the city's population," Warsaw's mayor, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, said during the inauguration ceremony.
The plaques, and an accompanying tourist map, were developed by Warsaw city hall, the culture ministry and the Jewish Historical Institute, a renowned Polish centre for the study of the Holocaust.
For some, the trail evokes an all-too-real past.
"The plaques have revived my worst memories. My escape from the ghetto, my separation from my mother and little sister who stayed there and died," said Estera Migdalska, 78, at the ceremony.
On the eve of World War II, Poland was Europe's Jewish heartland, home to 3.5 million Jews who made up around a tenth of the country's total population.
Warsaw was the the largest Jewish city in Europe.
After invading in 1939, Nazi Germany set up ghettos across Poland to isolate and later wipe out the Jews.
Half of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish.
At its height, around 450,000 people were crammed behind the walls of the 307-hectare (758-acre) ghetto centred on Warsaw's traditional Jewish quarter.
About 100,000 died inside from starvation and disease.
More than 300,000 were sent by train to the Treblinka death camp, 100 kilometres (60 miles) to the northeast, mostly in mass deportations in 1942.
In April 1943 the Nazis decided to wipe out the remaining tens of thousands of ghetto-dwellers.
The move sparked an ill-fated uprising by hundreds of young Jews who decided to fight rather than face near-certain death.
Around 7000 Jews died in the month-long revolt, most of them burned alive, and more than 50,000 were deported to the death camps.
The Nazis razed most of the district as they crushed the revolt. Similar destruction was unleashed on the rest of Warsaw after a failed two-month uprising by the wider Polish resistance in 1944.
The ruins were largely swept away during a vast post-war construction programme by Poland's communist regime, meaning there is little physical trace of the ghetto.
A few sections of ghetto wall are visible, as well as the Nozyk synagogue, the single Jewish place of worship in Warsaw to have survived the occupation, when it was used as a stable.
The city's Jewish cemetery also survived, despite heavy damage.
Plaques and memorials were put up across post-war Warsaw, but the trail makes it easier to trace the boundary.
"This project helps remembrance of Warsaw's dramatic history. Thanks to the plaques, more people will be aware of the extent of the ghetto," said Michael Schudrich, Poland's chief rabbi.
Poland today is home to less than 15,000 Jews out of a total population of 38 million people, more than 90 per cent of whom are Roman Catholic.
AFP
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