Umschlagplatz
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The Umschlagplatz (literally 'transshipment square') was the former railway siding by Dzika Street. Here the Nazis loaded deportees onto cattle trucks to be 'resettled in the east', which in practice meant being sent to the extermination camp at Treblinka, 60 kilometres (40 miles) north-east of Warsaw. During the Great Deportation several thousand people were being sent from here each day. Prior to this it had been the Transferstelle, a sort of customs control dealing with the movement of goods in and out of the ghetto.
This marble monument, designed by architect Hanna Szmalenberg and sculptor Wladyslaw Klamerus, was put up in 1988. The blocks resemble the cattle trucks which took the deportees to their deaths. The black and white colour scheme is inspired by Jewish ritual robes, while the black semi-circle over the entrance, depicting a fallen forest, refers to the symbols on Jewish gravestones.
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| The Umschlagplatz memorial, seen looking north across Stawki Street |
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The growing tree seen through the slot in the memorial is intended as a symbol of hope (left). The building to the right is the former hospital at 6/8 Stawki Street
Over 300,000 people were sent from this place to be gassed at Treblinka. A moving feature of the memorial is the way that it commemorates these hundreds of thousands of dead by giving a simple list of several hundred Jewish first names (below)
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