The small crowd of people form a half-moon, mostly daffodils in hand, under sprouting trees. On this April 18, in this discreet building courtyard in the center of the Polish capital, she is there, in the middle of everyone, the wrinkled features that betray her 91 years, the assertive voice despite her frail appearance. Krystyna Budnicka, purple scarf around her neck, holds one of these bouquets of yellow flowers, symbol of a memorable feat of arms in Poland: 80 years ago, to the day, the Warsaw ghetto rose up against the Nazi occupier.
Thus, it is in this public garden that the “square of the Kuczer family” has just been baptized, the birth name of Mme Budnicka. An honor for this lifelong Warsaw woman, who is one of the handful of survivors of the greatest act of Jewish rebellion of the Second World War. This square, beyond the symbol, gives him relief, as if, finally, his family could have a semblance of burial. His six brothers, his sister, his parents, his four sisters-in-law, all plunged into the horrors of the ghetto or the death camps. “I never had a place to collect myself and light a candle, my family didn’t have a grave worthy of the name. From now on, I will be able to commemorate my loved ones better. I had a loving family and overnight I became an orphan, homeless. »
A stone’s throw from the square is the former Place Muranowski, where Krystyna Budnicka lived as a child. Trams now run there. The places, like the 90% of Jews who died in Poland alone, have been removed. An underground cache had been built there by his brothers, also ghetto insurgents. It was thanks to the sewers that Krystyna Budnicka survived, hiding in the Aryan part of the city, at the age of 11. “I felt Warsaw burn, even in the bunker, where I stayed for nine months. I am in no way a hero, I always had people who took care of me, and I did not take part in the fights. Modest, this guardian of memory makes it her duty to bear witness, especially to young people. “Because the worst that can happen is to fall into indifference. »
The neighborhood she once knew is gone. “There is nothing left, and fortunately, otherwise it would be too difficult”, admits the survivor. The district of Muranów, where the former ghetto was located, is singularly hilly in places: an anomaly in this flat capital. After the war, a new life was rebuilt on the rubble of the ghetto. The Jewish presence is under the ruins, like a vast cemetery. Sometimes it comes out of the ground. Covered. Balcony remnants. Ceramics. In recent months, archaeological excavations, carried out under the direction of Professor Jacek Konik, have made it possible to bring out a plot. The calm-toned man points to a child-sized black shoe, worn from time spent underground. “Like any archaeologist, a sort of dialogue opens up with the person to whom the object belonged. Because of ideology, this little girl was prevented from living. »
Ghetto Hell
Shortly after the German invasion, the 1er September 1939, the Polish garrison capitulated, its government going into exile in London. The troops of IIIe Reich established a Warsaw Jewish ghetto, the largest in Europe, which they walled up in November 1940. Up to 450,000 Jews were herded into these overcrowded places, where contraband such as typhus, among other diseases, proliferated. Beggars struggle to survive in streets strewn with corpses. In the first year, malnutrition killed more than 40,000 people.
The hell of the ghetto is thus a slow death, where misery lurks around the corner. It is also, for many unfortunates, the beginnings of the “final solution”. The wagons fill up by the thousands every day on the Umschlagplatz, the “transhipment square” at the gates of the ghetto. Deportations followed at a frantic pace from July 1942 to the Treblinka extermination camp, 80 kilometers to the east. Won by hunger, some volunteered, in return for a bit of bread, to go “to work in the East”, hardly knowing the genocidal aims of the invader.
The ghetto empties until the fall. Most of the approximately 50,000 survivors are forced to work in ” shops from the ghetto, from the German factories. The hope of escaping death rests on servitude. “Survivors searched vacant apartments for food. After the great deportation, the ghetto was plunged into despair,” says Zachary Mazur, historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences. But on January 18, 1943, when the final roundup of deportation was decreed, the German forces, suddenly attacked by ambushed fighters, beat a retreat: the Jewish resistance, perked up, organized itself. Composed of young men with no military experience, communist militants as well as Zionists, it erects bunkers and underground caches, collects pistols and Molotov cocktails.
On April 19, 1943, the eve of the Jewish Passover, the Waffen SS and their auxiliaries, armed with their heavy artillery, returned to the ghetto to liquidate it. The uprising is born. A thousand, at most, took up arms in the face of the formidable firepower of the enemy. “Many simply didn’t have the strength to do the same, or simply lacked the weapons. But trying to survive by hiding was also a way of resisting, ”explains Zachary Mazur.
Marek Edelman, one of the instigators of the insurrection, who died in 2009, summarized this fever of revolt to the writer Hanna Krall, in his book Take the good Lord of speed “It was simply a matter of not letting our throats be cut in our turn. Basically, it was just to choose our way of dying. The liquidation of the ghetto was to last only three days, it will stretch until May 16. The pugnacity of the resistance will anger the SS, who immediately transform the ghetto into a gigantic fire. They reign terror even underground, flooding or asphyxiating the pipes in order to eradicate those who were holed up there.
Duty of memory
Warsawians will wear these little yellow paper daffodils in large numbers, as in previous years. As the last witnesses go out, this 80e anniversary, highly symbolic, does not fail to be underlined. Abundant for the occasion, conferences, historical walks, round tables, foreign delegations. A duty of memory to which hundreds of schools or libraries have joined.
It has not always been so. For a long time, Muranów was an almost ghostly residential area, still frozen in the austerity of socialist realism. The Polin Jewish History Museum, inaugurated in 2013, made him reconnect with his past. In the shadow of the Warsaw uprising, which broke out in 1944, and muted during the communist era, the memory of the ghetto is finally anchored in people’s minds. While in 2013, only 31% of Poles considered, according to a poll, the uprising of the ghetto as important in the first place for them, this number had jumped by 18 points, five years later. The sign of a society that “increasingly integrates the history of the ghetto as that of their country, and not only of the Jews”, rejoices Zofia Bojańczyk, coordinator of the Polin commemoration campaign.
Of the commemorative plaques appearing in what was the former ghetto, it is perhaps this mound surmounted by a rock, at the corner of the discreet Miła street, which most strikes the imagination. There, under the lawn mound, Mordechaj Anielewicz and his brothers in arms from the Jewish Combat Organization killed themselves on May 8, 1943, their bunker being surrounded on all sides. “When the weather is nice, mothers take their children there for walks, lovers come to shelter in the evening,” Edelman said. To tell the truth, it is a mass grave. We never dug up the bones. On this gray afternoon, a group of young Israelis listen attentively to their guide, while a cat basks in the middle of the grass and daffodils. The sirens will roar there, as elsewhere in the city on April 19, to recall the heroism of these fighters quick to die for human dignity.