It is a deeply complicated story. Its every aspect presents grounds for passionate debate, for applause and anger, for wonder and tears; it is a theatre of history. It is rare for a museum to elicit such diverse emotions, yet manage to tell a narrative that succeeds in being both comprehensive and selective in its rendering of the story of a people whose lives were intertwined with another history that was central to their own.
It is the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Even its location is fraught: situated in the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto, destroyed by the Germans in 1943, facing Nathan Rapoport’s marble and bronze Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in a city that was itself totally demolished by the Nazis. This is a place that had once been at the heart of European Jewish culture – Jews were about a third of the population of the city – and just a short distance from the Umschlagplatz, the deportation point for the last 300,000 Jews to the death camps. During World War II, there were more people killed in Warsaw alone (about 600,000) than in France or the UK.
