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REMEMBERING from page 22
more than 300,000 Jews made up
about one-third of the city's popula-
tion. The Nazis forced more than
500,000 Jews into the cramped ghetto
in Warsaw's old Jewish quarter.
At least 3 million Polish Jews, includ-
ing almost all of Warsaw's Jewish popu-
lation, were killed in the Holocaust.
'As a child in Warsaw, I grew up
knowing that to be a Jew meant to
come from a family that had undergone
extermination and tremendous suffer-
ing," said Olek Mincer, 44, a Polish
Jewish actor who now lives in Rome.
"But when I got older and learned that
there had been a revolt in the ghetto, I felt
a sort of relief to learn that Jews had done
this," he said. "I felt pride, for example,
riding a tram down the long street in
Warsaw that is named after Mordecai
Anielewicz, the leader of the uprising."
Lena Stanley-Clamp, the Polish-born
director of the London-based
European Association for Jewish
Culture, says the Warsaw Ghetto and
the uprising have also had a powerful
influence well outside Poland's borders.
"They have become embedded in both
memory and in popular culture and the
arts," said Stanley-Clamp, who was one
of more than 15,000 Jews forced to flee
Poland in 1968 by the communist
regime's "anti-Zionist" purges.
The latest example, she pointed out,
is in Roman Polanski's Academy
Award-winning film The Pianist,
which recounts the true story of a Jew
who survived the war in Warsaw. In
one scene, he is shown watching
flames and destruction of the ghetto
from his hiding place in the relative
safety of the "Aryan" part of town.
Already in 1943, the Polish poet
Czeslaw Milosz wrote a poem,
"Campo dei Fiori" that described how
Poles outside the ghetto were oblivious
to the fate of the Jews.
In it, he evoked an unforgettable
image: a merry-go-round outside the
ghetto walls happily spinning as the
ghetto itself went up in flames and the
wind blew charred bits of ash onto
"the happy throngs on a beautiful
Warsaw Sunday."
Two years later, in his book The
Ghetto Fights, Edelman described what
was going on behind the walls:
"The sea of flames flooded houses and
courtyards," he wrote. "There was no air,
only black, choking smoke and heavy
burning heat radiating from the red-hot
walls, from the glowing stone stairs.
"The omnipotent flames were now
able to accomplish what the Germans
could not do. Thousands of people per-
ished in the conflagrations. The stench
of burning bodies was everywhere."
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23