The Umschlagplatz Memorial

Why is it significant?

Stand before the tall gateway of white Swedish granite: the wall rises around you like an open boxcar, and on the frieze above your head hundreds of first names are carved into the pale stone. This is the Umschlagplatz, the departure point of no return and the darkest corner of Warsaw's history.

Key Facts

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Stand before the tall gateway of white Swedish granite: the wall rises around you like an open boxcar, and on the frieze above your head hundreds of first names are carved into the pale stone. This is the Umschlagplatz, the departure point of no return and the darkest corner of Warsaw's history. On this gravel freight siding between warehouses and railway spurs, the fate of more than a quarter of the city's inhabitants was sealed in the summer of 1942. Between 22 July and 12 September 1942, in what the German occupiers called the Grossaktion, SS and police squads rounded up between five and ten thousand Jewish people every day from the sealed ghetto and marched them to these tracks. They were driven with clubs and whips into wooden cattle cars whose floorboards were covered with caustic quicklime, then dispatched without water northeast to the gas chambers of Treblinka. In just over seven weeks, more than 250,000 men, women and children were murdered. Adam Czerniaków, the head of the Jewish Council, swallowed cyanide on the second day of the deportations rather than sign the transport lists for the children. Look closely at the monument, erected in 1988: the black basalt band along the white wall mirrors the black border of a Jewish prayer shawl. The four hundred first names carved here, from Aba to Żanna, represent hundreds of thousands whose graves exist nowhere on earth. Around you now stand quiet post-war apartment blocks and university faculties... life has reclaimed the ground, but the memory lingers in every stone. The most famous person to step onto these wagons was Dr Janusz Korczak, the beloved educator, writer and paediatrician. Offered a hiding place on the Aryan side of the city by Polish friends, he refused to abandon his charges. On 5 August 1942, Korczak led nearly two hundred children from his orphanage Hand in Hand in quiet double file onto the train, carrying their small green flag. His quiet courage remains an enduring light against the brutality of this railway ramp. Our walk today traces the geography of this lost metropolis, from the deportation siding to the bunkers of the fighters, the bridges over Aryan streets, and the only synagogue to survive the flames. Walk east along Stawki street and turn right into Dubois street, heading towards a grassy mound at the corner of Miła.