Mieczysław Jędruszczak, who worked for decades to protect and preserve the surviving remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto wall, has died at the age of 94.
A veteran of Poland’s World War II underground Home Army who was also interned in a Soviet labor camp for three years, Jędruszczak was born in Puławy in 1921.
In its obituary, Virtual Shtetl writes that Jędruszczak’s involvement in documenting and preserving the memory of Jewish victims in World War II dates back to the 1960s, when he “undertook to document the fortunes of Jewish soldiers deported in the winter of 1940 from Lublin to Biała Podlaska. During a strenuous march in harsh weather, many prisoners died of exhaustion or were killed.”
Thirty years later, Mieczysław Jędruszczak set out on the same route. Travelling by buses, wagons and on foot, he reached witnesses from towns and villages through which the prisoners once marched. Based on his findings, he wrote a long article published by “Fołks Sztyme”. He also advocated for placing a gravestone on one of the unmarked graves of the death march participants.
He was best known, however, for his decades-long dedication in protecting and preserving the few surviving remnants of the wall that had surrounded the Nazis’ Warsaw Ghetto and making these sites memorials to the hundreds of thousands who Jews who were confined there, died there, or were deported from there to their deaths.
First, in the 1970s, he prevented two sections of the wall, including in the back yard of his home, from being pulled down.
For years, he advocated for proper marking of the walls. Due to his efforts and pressure, information boards were placed and the former ghetto wall became an important spot on the map of Warsaw.
Taking care of the ghetto wall remains became the life’s mission for Mieczysław Jędruszczak.He spent his entire free time talking to tourists who came to see the walls. He told them about the Holocaust and his efforts to preserve the memory. He was known by tens of thousands of people all over the world.
May his soul be bound up in the bond of life.
Read the full obituary on Virtual Shtetl
1 comment on “Poland: Guardian of Warsaw Ghetto wall dies”
may his memory be a blessing for Am Yisrael