“Krysia” Bunker denounced 75 years ago
When a Jew finds himself on the Aryan side, he has two possibilities – to be “on the surface” or to go undreground. In the first instance, the Jew transforms into an Aryan. He is supplied with Aryan papers and lives legally [...]. In the second instance, a Jew with a Semitic appearance either hides in a shelter or in a camouflaged room, where he lives illegally.
– Emanuel Ringelblum, written while in hiding on the “Aryan side”.
In the spring of 1943, Emanuel Ringelblum, historian and creator of the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archive, went into hiding on the “Aryan side”, with his wife Judyta and son Uri. They were hiding in the “Krysia” bunker – a specially prepared hiding place, under the greenhouse, at 81 Grójecka Street in Warsaw. It had been organised by the Wolski family, who were local gardeners. Since 1942, Mieczysław Wolski, his mother Małgorzata, sisters Halina and Wanda, as well as, nephew Janusz Wysocki, had been hiding Jews.
It is estimated that, following the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, the “Krysia” bunker was one of the largest in occupied Warsaw. Around forty Jews were hidden there.
Denunciation of the Hiding-Place
According to Małgorzata Wolska, a witness to the raid on 7th March 1944, the Germans, with the help of Police, surrounded the home, including the greenhouse. They forced the Jews from their hiding-place into the yard – first mothers with children and then the men. One of them, the lawyer, Tadeusz Klinger, managed to swallow cyanide and died on the spot. The rest, together with Mieczysław Wolski and Janusz Wysocki, were take to Pawiak Prison and then shot amongst the ghetto ruins – probably on 10th March. Emanuel Ringelblum was also killed there.
The place and date of that execution still aroses controversy. Małgorzata Wolska and her daughter survived. The greenhouse and the bunker were destroyed.
Read the story of the “Krysia” bunker »
In 1989, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalemm decided to honour the Wolski family and Janusz Wysocki with the title of Righteous Among the Nations. Since 2009, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archive is stored, has been named in honour of Emanuel Ringelblum. The Archive is a unique collection of documents for reasearching the Holocaust of the Jews in occupied Poland. It has been included UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” Register. The fate of its creators is presented in the film Kto napisze naszą historię? (Who Will Write Our Story?), which premiered during this year's International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day.
A memorial plaque also commemorates the events of March 1944. It was unveiled in 1990 on the site where the Wolski home had once stood at 81 Grójecka (now No.77). To mark the 75th anniversary of the denunciation, a ceremony was organised there by the Jewish Historical Institute – read more on our Virtual Shtetl website »
Writings from the Hiding-Place on the “Aryan Side”
As part of the commemorations, there was also a discussion about the next two published volumes of “The Ringelbum Archive. Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto”, plublished by the Jewish Historical Institute at the end of 2018 – “Emanuel Ringelblum’s writings from the Ghetto” (Vol. 29) and “...from the Bunker” (Vol. 29a). This is the first full-source edition of Ringelblum’s wartime legacy to be accompanied with academic resources. Vol. 29a is a special record of the author’s life while hiding on the “Aryan side”. As the publishers write:
Among them is an essay on Polish-Jewish relations which contain many statements which, to this day, have not lost their relevance. There are over eighty, longer or shorter, biographies of Ringelblum’s friends and colleagues. Finally, there is a letter his wife Judyta wrote to Adolf and Basia Berman. It is they who have preserved all the documents which we pubish in this volume. They are not formally part of the Archive, but they do constitute a significant extension of Ringelblum’s writings from the ghetto and they complement each other to such an extent that it was felt, without any doubt, necessary to publish them as a part of this edition.
