Monument
On 18 April 1988, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the outbreak of Warsaw 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 exterminantion camps.
400 most popular Jewish-Polish first names, in alphabetical order from Aba to Żanna, were engraved on the monument, each one commemorating 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 shattered forest - a symbol of the exterminantion of the Jewish nation.
The selection and sequence of colours of the monument (white with the black strip 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 late 1940s.
In 2002 the monument site and the adjacent school buildings were listed in the Register of Historic Monuments.
Read more about this topic: Umschlagplatz (Warsaw Ghetto)
Famous quotes containing the word monument:
“If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It is remarkable that the dead lie everywhere under stones.... Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate,—a stone to a bone? “Here lies,”M”Here lies”;Mwhy do they not sometimes write, There rises? Is it a monument to the body only that is intended?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)