How strange it is to walk through the former Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw - a place that experienced such destruction and such terror just 60 years ago. Frank Shouldice writes.
In truth, the Jewish community never got a chance to settle in the Polish capital, despite its long history in the city. Since their arrival in Warsaw in the 14th century Jews were expelled at different periods and officially banned from living inside city walls from 1527 to 1768. They moved to the Praga suburb on the eastern bank of the Vistula but even on their return to the city they endured pogroms at the hands of both Poles and Russians.
Little remains of the ghetto, created and then obliterated by occupying German forces. If you look for traces of what happened during Nazi occupation the search will yield only commemorative emblems. The devastation unleashed left almost nothing intact. An eight-hour walking tour of the "Historical Sights of Jewish Warsaw" yields only a handful of fragments to view.
Even before you reach the former ghetto you find a trail of destruction stunning in its ubiquity. Virtually every building was razed by the invading army. It took 14 years to renovate beautiful period buildings on Nowy Swiat (Royal Way), now a fashionable thoroughfare superbly restored to its former grandeur with up-market shops and restaurants. So too the cobblestoned Stare Masto (Old Town) inside the city walls.
The Jewish Ghetto is another matter. In an operation that prefigured the division of Berlin in 1961 the Germans set about confining the Jewish population to one selected area, closing off buildings and streets and raising 11 miles of perimeter walls. Over 110,000 Christians were ordered from their homes to make room.
The Jews, who comprised about one third of Warsaw's population at the were boxed into a residential area west of the city centre. It's now residential again, the land covered by colourlessly functional Soviet-style tower blocks. In 1939 almost 400,000 Jews lived in Warsaw; the Jewish community there is now estimated at about 10,000 people.
Jews were not allowed leave the ghetto and within a couple of years almost half-a-million people crowded its streets. Among the new arrivals were 5,000 prisoners brought from Auschwitz to Anielewicza Street to work in a labour camp recycling usable materials while Warsaw burned.
Standing in the courtyard of Sienna Street brings home the sense of confinement within the ghetto. The courtyard at the year of three large apartment buildings was enclosed by a 3.5-metre brick wall. The wall remains - a rare artefact from wartime - and even now that sense of fenced-in isolation remains palpable.
Human voices or traffic noise floating over the wall might as well come from Mars and one can only imagine what it was like during the incarceration to hear everyday life continuing outside while the ghetto imploded with hunger and disease.
Containment was only part of the process. A crossroads at Stawki Street became the railway departure point for Holocaust victims. From July 1942 onwards more than 5,000 people left from here every day for extermination at Treblinka. By the end of 1943 some 300,000 Jews had travelled this route to their death.
At that stage Hitler's plans for the systematic elimination of European Jews were so far advanced that anything that might impede the timetable was ruthlessly quashed. Despite being abandoned by the outside world the Jews did fight back, sometimes with the help of the Polish Underground. Guerrilla successes recorded by the Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB) inevitably brought savage retribution by the Nazis. When the Germans discovered a unit of ZOB fighters in their HQ bunker at Mila Street the men committed suicide collectively rather than surrender.
The heroic 1943 Warsaw Uprising stalled the Germans for a month - and liberated slave labourers at Anielewicza - but the victory was short-lived. At the end of the fighting over 60,000 Jews were killed and the ghetto went up in flames. Retribution was swift and mass deportation to Treblinka was accelerated.
Visiting the bunker at Mila Street - a mound of earth surrounded by concrete apartment blocks - I came across a Jewish couple standing silently. Both were Americans from the huge Polish community in Chicago. The girl was the first member of her family to set foot in Warsaw in over 60 years. Her elderly aunt, who lived near Mila Street, was the only one still alive who had survived the ghetto. "She doesn't talk about it," the girl sighed.
Witnessing family history in such profoundly disturbing draughts had reduced the couple to silence. They were glad to have finally made the journey but the whole day had been very difficult. "It's just surreal," said the girl as we stood over ground where brave men had taken their own lives.
A few local children climbed the grassy bunker with big toy jeeps. They shouted and yelped, making crashing sounds as they rolled the jeeps down the hill. They live in a quiet neighbourhood with a sadly muted history. For them the mound is a playground and the past is yet to happen.
The man from Chicago watched them and smiled ruefully at his girlfriend, struck at how oblivious the Polish children were to a Jewish memorial site. The kids never noticed the intrusion. They ran back to the top and rolled their toys down the side of the hill once more. "Surreal," the girl repeated, close to tears.