Berlin (epd). As the first representative of Germany, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will give a speech at the official commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Polish capital on Wednesday. At the invitation of Polish President Andrzej Duda, Steinmeier will take part in the commemoration together with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. This Wednesday marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the four-week uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, with which the Jewish residents fought in 1943 against their deportation to the Nazi death camps.
The invitation from Warsaw fills Steinmeier with gratitude and humility, according to the Office of the Federal President. Steinmeier will attend further events in Warsaw on Wednesday that are marked by history and German-Polish reconciliation. Among other things, a conversation with contemporary witnesses and participation in a service in the Nozyk Synagogue, which was the only Jewish place of worship in Warsaw to survive the Second World War, are planned. Before returning to Berlin, Steinmeier also wants to attend a concert by Israeli and Polish musicians.
When the Nazis wanted to deport the last residents of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw to the death camps on April 19, 1943, the people in the sealed-off area resisted. German police, Wehrmacht and SS units acted with great severity against the armed insurgents and blew up whole rows of houses. By mid-May they had broken the resistance and almost completely destroyed the ghetto. Around 56,000 people were killed in the fighting or were deported.
The “Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto” commemorates the resistance of the oppressed and persecuted in Warsaw today, in front of which the commemoration ceremonies will take place on Wednesday. When the then Chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD) knelt down in front of the memorial during a visit to Poland in 1970, the picture went around the world and went down in history as an important gesture of reconciliation.