GHETTO RUINS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 17, 31 October 1949, Page 3

GHETTO RUINS

WORKERS’ CITY RISING

PEOPLE OF WARSAW TAKE A HAND

(By Vincent Buist.—Reuter Correspondent). WARSAW.

The first of several workers’ settlements is to-day rising on the ruins of the famous Warsaw Ghetto, razed by the Germans during their occupation. During the next five yearg it is hoped to house some 50,000 people there. But this new “workers’ city” will stand about nine feet above the normal ground level of the area.

To clear all the rubble of the ghetto area to the level of the surrounding streets would, it is calculated, take 10,000 workers with seven trains and other salvage equipment gt least three years. Reconstruction cannot wait as long as that. To-day, five years after the liberation, it is still impossible to walk more than a block without encountering grass-covered masonry awaiting clearance. A determined attack on the task of clearing the ground in the ghetto area ready for the builders was made in September, when nearly every Pole in Warsaw who could handle a pick and shovel went to work on it. Every day throughout the month, when offices shut at 4 o’clock, typists and clerks cleared rubble from Europe’s most warshattered capital. M. Stanislow Tolwinski, Mayor of Warsaw, appealed to every ablebodied man, woman and youth living in the city to give up eight hours during the month to . work on bombed sites, salvaging bricks which could either be used for patching up damaged houses or plants or be manufactured into new brick slabs. They could put in a two-hour period after normal working hours four times a month, or devote a week-end to .the task.

The people of Warsaw responded enthusiastically. By. September 20 over 10,000,000 usable bricks had been unearthed and stacked ready to use again. No appeal touches the average Pole so much as one to help in beautifying the capital, three times destroyed in its 700. years of existence.

Ugly and dilapidated, strewn with smouldering ruins, creaking stffly back to vitality, this capital is dear to the hearts of its people. A stranger in Warsaw during September might have wondered at the wholehearted response of the populace to the Mayor’s appeal, but not so the population.

Parade Through Streets

Scarcely a head turned in the busy main shopping thoroughfare of Narszakowska—tne Street of the Marshals of Poland—as, each afternoon, the reconstruction contingents paraded through .the capital on foot or in the trucks flying red and white banners. Everyone either had done or would be doing the same. In the processions marched mothers and daughters, professors and students, factory bosses and employees. Every day the parades converged on the site of the former Warsaw ghetto, perhaps the most melancholy’ memorial to race hatred in Europe. It is certainly .the most completely annihilated district in a city which was 85 per cent, destroyed by war. What used to be the Jewish quarters of pre-war Warsaw, a district teeming with life and. boasting a market at every street corner, now lies an ashen plateau under the autumn skies. It is a wilderness of 700,000 square acres of . charred and rusty rubble standing nine feet high above .the surronding ■ streets.

Only two objects break that desolate horizon. One is the spirit of a Catholic church, spared because it had no link with Jewry. The other is a 30-foot-high monument in granite and bronze erected to the memory of the heroes of the ghetto.

In the early part of their wartime occupation of Poland the Germans walled in the Warsaw ghetto and transformed it into a staging camp for Jews on their way to labour or concentration camps. With arms smuggled in through sewers from the Polish underground forces outside, the Jews rose in revolt in the Spring cf J 943. After six weeks’ ferocious fighting against German SS troops, the revolt was quelled. In those conditions of chaos no roll-call of survivors could be made, but it is claimed that at least 20,000 Jews were slaughtered during the six weeks’ fighting. . This grim spot sprang to life with a blare of noise every day during September when the volunteer workers halted at pre-selected sites. From loud-speakers strung up on posts throughout the ghetto area, dance music and national tunes rang out across the barren land, drowning the thud of picks against masonry as the volunteers began their two-hour spell of work. After an hour’s work, Polish mobile welfare units pulled up alongside with sandwiches, boiled sausages strongly flavoured with garlic, and black tea. As dusk fell, the city dwellers, dirt-streaked but apparently cheerful, began stacking the day's salvage into piles by the roadside to be counted by official checkers.

A Competition •>

Rubble-removing became something of a competition, each district vying with its neighbours. Wooden hoardings were hammered into existence in the main squares of the capital, giving day-to-day accounts of progress at the ghetto. Both totals and individual records were registered. The people of Praga, a workingclass district on the east side of the Vistula, topped the poll most of the month with an average of 375 bricks a person.

Bricks too cracked for immediate use went to crushing plants where, with the help of cementing materials, they will be manufactured into brick, slabs. Measuring about one foot by two, they emerge from the process with a smooth surface and pale pink tinge, which give the newly built sections of Warsaw streets a complexion reminiscent of a stage set under rosecoloured lights. Money for the city’s reconstruction pours in from every town and village throughout the country. Out of all workers in Poland, 96 per cent, make monthly contributions to the fund, the contributions being deducted at source from their wages.

Much of Warsaw’s phenomenal progress is the result of a concentration of national resources in the city area. Whereas expenditure per square kilometre in Warsaw this year rose to 254

milliard zloties, in Silesia, the next most favoured area, the figure is as low as 3.8 milliard zloties. Nevertheless, the task of freeing Warsaw from ruins is one to be measured in terms of years, not months.