Warsaw Ghetto Museum

About

The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is a historical museum in Warsaw currently under construction. The target seat of the museum is the historic complex of the former Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital at Śliska 51 St./Sienna 60 St. The museum’s director from 2018 to 2025 was Albert Stankowski. His successor, the Polish historian Katarzyna Person, was elected for the 2025–2030 term. The mission of the institution is to disseminate knowledge about the everyday life, survival strategies, fight and extermination of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos on territory of the occupied Poland. The museum's team is working on the creation of a permanent exhibition in the revitalised building of the former Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital, collecting archives, artefacts and testimonies of memory and drawing on the achievements, experience and resources of Polish and foreign institutions that deal with the topic of the ghetto. The statutory tasks of the museum include: activities for the protection and care of the cultural heritage of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, conducting cultural, scientific, educational and popularisation activities related to the history of the Warsaw Ghetto and...

Sigmund Nissenbaum, a participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was the first initiator of the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum. At the end of the 1980s, he contacted the President of the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy, prof. Henryk Jabłoński, to entrust the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum to the Nissenbaum Family Foundation. However, the works did not start at that point.

On 14 November 2017, the decision to establish the Warsaw Ghetto Museum was announced by the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Gliński. The museum was officially established on 28 February 2018. On 7 March 2018, in the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, there was a press conference on the establishment of the new institution, attended by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Minister Piotr Gliński. Critics linked the timing of the announcement to the diplomatic crisis caused by the 2018 amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance and to broader concerns about the historical policy of the Law and Justice government.

In October 2018, the local government of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship leased the complex of the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital to the museum for 30 years. Both buildings of the former hospital - the main pavilion and the southern pavilion - have been entered on the list of historical monuments by the Mazowieckie Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments in 2018. The permanent exhibition of the museum will be presented in the main building of the former hospital, while the two-storey southern pavilion, where the ophthalmology department was located, is to become the seat of the Education Department of the museum.

In November 2020, on the 80th anniversary of the closing of the ghetto borders, the authorities of the Mazowieckie Voivodeship sold the museum building for PLN 22.7 million (the funds for that purpose were provided by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage ). The museum had earlier been planned to open in 2023, on the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but in 2025 a museum spokesperson said that the opening was planned for September 2027.

In 2020, the Institute of National Remembrance agreed to hand over the original of the Stroop Report as a deposit for the permanent exhibition at the museum. [ citation needed ]

The first meeting of the international Warsaw Ghetto Museum Council, that consisted of 15 members, took place on 10 September 2019. The Chairman of the Council became the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich. In June 2021, the position was taken by Colette Avital.

The concept for the visual identity of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum is the result of an international competition organised jointly with the Polish Association of Applied Graphic Designers. The competition was announced in September 2019. In the first stage, 216 applications were submitted, out of which the jury selected 6. The authors of the winning concept are the designers from the Lithuanian studio DADADA.

The work on the concept of the permanent exhibition began in 2019, under the supervision of Daniel Blatman, a historian and Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The scientific team of the museum prepared documents with the initial concept of the exhibition. The team adopted three key parameters, which will constitute dominant themes in the historical narrative of the museum:

- a presentation of the broad perspective of Jewish life in Poland during the German occupation, going beyond the framework of Jewish history in the Warsaw Ghetto;

- the history of the Warsaw Ghetto against the background of the history of occupied Warsaw;

- conveying a universal message, based on which the tragedy of the Holocaust and extermination of Jews in Warsaw is the starting point for learning about the fate of other victims of Nazi persecution and for demonstrating humanistic values such as tolerance, compassion for minorities, dialogue between religious, ethnic and national groups. Blatman described the planned exhibition as an attempt to place the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust within the broader history of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Poland, while still centring the fate of the Jews. He also argued that a museum located on a site where the Holocaust occurred could not tell the history of the ghetto without addressing what happened outside the ghetto wall.

The permanent exhibition of the museum is to be based on authentic artefacts from the period of the German occupation of Poland.

In autumn 2022, the museum published a series of videos presenting the concepts of the permanent exhibition galleries. The videos featured the curators of the galleries and specialists involved in the preparation of the exhibition.

The museum constantly looks for historical artefacts, testimonies and documents relating to the functioning of the Warsaw Ghetto and its commemoration.

In 2022, the museum's collection included 5,125 artefacts, divided into archives, iconography and exhibits.

In 2025, the museum announced that Blatman's contract would end on 31 October 2025, explaining that the institution had entered the production phase of the permanent exhibition and that the historical-narrative work had been completed. Blatman disputed this explanation and warned that narrowing the exhibition, reducing material on other victims of Nazi genocide and changing the approved concept without transparent scholarly oversight would damage the museum’s credibility. A museum spokesperson denied that changes had been introduced to the permanent exhibition or to the historical narrative adopted in 2023.

Before its opening, the museum became the subject of controversy among Polish and Israeli Holocaust scholars over whether an institution created and financed under the Law and Justice government would present the Holocaust without subordinating it to PiS historical policy. Critics argued that the museum risked emphasizing Polish-Jewish solidarity and German perpetrators while insufficiently addressing Polish antisemitism, collaboration, denunciations, blackmail and violence against Jews during the Holocaust. The Polish Centre for Holocaust Research scholar Agnieszka Haska argued that the history of the Holocaust could not be selectively presented and that the Righteous Among the Nations were an exception rather than the norm in the spectrum of Polish wartime behaviour towards Jews. Havi Dreifuss of Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem rejected an invitation to work with the museum, arguing that it sought Israeli approval for a project that many leading Polish Holocaust historians had refused to support. Dreifuss and Polish Holocaust historians including Jan Grabowski, Barbara Engelking, Agnieszka Haska and Jacek Leociak criticized Blatman's role as legitimising a PiS-backed narrative of the Holocaust. In this debate, the key criticism was that the participation of Poles in the persecution and murder of Jews must not disappear from a museum narrative limited to victims and German perpetrators.

Blatman rejected the criticism and said that no area of Holocaust history was taboo for the museum, including Polish antisemitism and instances of collaboration. Albert Stankowski also denied that the authorities had made political demands or steered the museum’s content. In 2025, a further dispute arose after Blatman said that parts of the exhibition concerning other victims of Nazi genocide and references to other twentieth-century genocides were being removed, which he described as a distortion of history motivated by sensitivity to possible comparisons with the war in Gaza. The museum denied that the approved historical narrative of the exhibition had been changed.

The most valuable artefacts in WGM collection