From Zydowska street to Umschlagplatz (1)
From; http://www.um.warszawa.pl/zmh/

Jacek Leociak

"I know that the Jews have disappeared from Warsaw, but I cannot
truly imagine it. When I say: 'Warsaw,' in my soul's eye I see the
old, Jewish Warsaw. I see Jewish streets, vendors' stalls, synagogues,
houses of study, marketplaces, courtyards full of Jewish inhabitants.
Despite what I know, I cannot present Warsaw judenrien nor Jewish
streets as heaps of rubble," wrote future Noble Literary Prize winner
Isaac Bashevis Singer in July 1944 in the New York Yiddish newspaper
Forverts.

The life of a capital city has now taken the place of rubble
where there were once the Jewish streets. Shop windows reflect the
glass silhouettes of new buildings, the faces of colorfully dressed
passers-by and busy streets. Standing in the middle of the urban
traffic and tumult are we aware that not so long ago (for 60 years is
not millennia) Jewish Warsaw existed here for centuries as an
indivisible part of the urban fabric? Do we remember that inter-war
Warsaw was the largest Jewish city in Europe and the second in the
world, after New York; that Jews made up 30 percent of the capital's
population? And what is it like today? Some 400 people are members of
the Jewish Community in Warsaw (revived in 1997) and around 6,000 are
registered with the Jewish Religious Association. The total number of
Jews residing in Poland is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000.

The Warsaw Jews have disappeared irretrievably, their Warsaw was
destroyed irrevocably. Singer still had the images of people and
places from before the Holocaust before his eyes. All that is left for
us are a few fragile material traces, inscriptions, documents and
testimonies - the legacy of surviving memory.

"Historic Jewish Places in Warsaw" is a guide leading us along
paths wiped out by the destructive force of time, crime and
forgetfulness. For the first time the history of the Warsaw Jews has
been presented in the form of a guidebook, inspired in layout and
editorial style by the finest traditions of the Paskal series. The
enclosed timeline presents the most important stages of the Jewish
presence in Warsaw, and the core of the publication are comprehensive
descriptions of 54 locations linked with the history of Warsaw's Jews,
presented in alphabetical order. The guide is richly illustrated and
includes a map on which these places are marked, to help at least in
part to perceive what Singer saw in his "mind's eye." A separate map
shows the streets from the time of the Warsaw Ghetto with the street
grid of contemporary Warsaw superimposed on it, along with the
fragments of surviving buildings, which effectively conveys the scale
of the destruction and vastness of topographic changes that this part
of the city underwent after the war. With this map in hand you can
follow in the footsteps of the Warsaw Jews in the most tragic period
of their history.

For the rest go to; http://www.um.warszawa.pl/zmh/