Poland hands over site of future Warsaw Ghetto Museum

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A museum dedicated to the Jews who suffered in the Warsaw Ghetto during Nazi Germany’s wartime occupation of Poland came closer to reality Friday with a key handover ceremony.

Plans call for the Warsaw Ghetto Museum to be housed in a former children's hospital that was within the ghetto's walls. It is scheduled to open in 2023 on the 80th anniversary of the uprising by Jews in the ghetto.

Museum director Albert Stankowski received a key to the property from a government official and signed a long-term lease Friday during a ceremony at the future museum site.

Jewish philanthropists established the hospital in the late 19th century and treated both Jewish and Christian children, among them tuberculosis patients.

People hold daffodils while attending an independent ceremony in honor of the fighters of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on its 75th anniversary, at the Szmul Zygielbojm monument in Warsaw, Poland, April 19, 2018. /VCG Photo

During World War II, the hospital was encircled within the crowded ghetto that the Germans erected to imprison Warsaw's Jewish residents before sending them to their deaths in the Treblinka death camp.

One of the stories the future museum will tell is of the harrowing decision that some Jewish doctors made to give many children fatal overdoses of morphine to spare them worse deaths in Treblinka.

"This museum will be very important for all Jews because it's a symbol of the Shoah and the extermination of the Jewish people," Stankowski told The Associated Press. "But even more importantly, it has a universal message important for the whole world. It shows what can happen when people are dehumanized."

Young volunteers distribute paper yellow daffodils, a symbol of remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, on the 75th anniversary of the uprising in Warsaw, Poland, April 19, 2018. /VCG Photo

The museum site operated as children's hospital until 2013. The building is among the few structures to have mostly survived stages of the nearly six-year war, including massive German bombings of the ghetto and then greater Warsaw following a 1944 uprising led by the Polish resistance.

The idea to transform it into the museum came from Pawel Spiewak, the head of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

Stankowski, a Polish Jewish historian, said scholars from the United States and Israel are also being tapped to shape the exhibition.

The project is likely saving the two buildings. They are in the Polish capital's main business district, where many skyscrapers have been built.

(Top Photo: Bouquets of flowers are laid around the Ghetto Heroes Monument a few days after the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Warsaw, Poland, April 2018. /VCG Photo)

Source(s): AP