„Żywa pamięć”. Pomnik Bohaterów Getta Natana Rapoporta
"Living Memory". Monument to the Ghetto Heroes by Natan Rapoport

Summary/Abstract: The Jewish armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became a symbol of Jewish bravery for the Jewish people and the world. Many artists, those who were born in Warsaw or Poland, artists who experience the Holocaust in other locations, and other artists with no personal connection to the Holocaust, referred to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in private and public artistic expressions. The artists understood the moral value, significance, and importance of it as a historical event and portrayed it with pride and admiration. The various artistic representation of the symbolic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was shown as the extolled chapter in the sequence of the Jewish fighting against the Nazis in the ghetto. This chapter presents the fabric of the artistic representations of the active behavior of males and females who fought against the Nazis. The years 1944–1949 were a time of “living memory”, which was, on the one hand, caused by the fact that the trauma was such recent history, and on the other by the fact that the memory of the war was not yet monopolized by the state and the Communist leadership. It was a time when the commemoration of the Holocaust was not yet formalized in Poland and could take the form of various spontaneous actions. For the Jewish community in Poland, the unveiling of the Monument to Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw could be seen as the crowning and a symbol of these numerous and quite often private and local initiatives. The Monument was unveiled on 19 April 1948, om the 5th anniversary of the outbreak of the uprising. Its author is Natan Rapoport (1911–1987), a graduate of the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy. The architectural surroundings were designed and construction supervised by Leon Marek Suzin (1901–1976).Monuments are the primary open-space signs of memory about great people and historical events. For Jews from Poland, from the diaspora or from Israel, this monument is one of the most important tokens of memory about the Holocaust.

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