WARSAW (JTA) — In the center of Poland’s capital, a brick wall separates the humming traffic of Okopowa Street from a quiet wilderness filled with graves.
This is Warsaw’s main Jewish cemetery and one of the largest in Europe, a sprawling forest of 83 acres and the final resting place of some 200,000 Jews. Since 1806, the cemetery has held generations of cultural luminaries, rabbis and political activists — from the writers S. An-ski and I.L. Peretz to Ludwik Zamenhof, who created the international language of Esperanto, to Mark Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Some gravestones stand tall and pristine. But deeper into the cemetery, amid a tangle of maple, birch and acacia trees, more and more bend under the weight of time and neglect. Their inscriptions have faded and succumbed to ivy, leaving thousands of nameless stones in the thicket. An estimated 50,000 Jews who lie there have no stones at all — they were killed by hunger, disease or execution under the Nazis and consigned to two deep mass graves.
For decades after World War II, a long silence engulfed Poland’s Jewish history and the atrocities committed there. Nine in 10 Polish Jews were killed, many survivors left the country, and those who stayed often concealed their Jewishness under the Soviet Union. With family chains severed and few left to remember the dead, the cemetery became a forest. A place that had no trees before the war grew about 8,000 of them, while falling leaves transformed into new layers of soil and further buried the dead.
But in the last few years, a new form of life has come to the cemetery. Young people stand in between the gravestones, chattering, laughing and digging with shovels.
It’s a strange sight in a Jewish burial ground, where religious law says the dead must remain undisturbed in perpetuity. These newcomers are archaeology students from the University of Warsaw, who convinced Poland’s Jewish authorities to let them work on restoring the cemetery’s pre-war infrastructure — beneath the soil and debris piled over the untrodden paths to Jewish graves.
It started in 2020, when students discovered that COVID-19 restrictions were shutting down archaeological sites around the world. Panicked over completing the digs required for them to graduate, they asked about working in their own city at the Okopowa Street cemetery. Soon they came head-to-head with the Rabbinical Commission for Cemeteries, which protects Jewish burial sites in Poland.
Witold Wrzosinski, the cemetery director and a member of Warsaw’s small Jewish community, watched these negotiations.
“The rabbis obviously said, ‘Go away, you’re crazy — stupid idea, digging around in a Jewish cemetery,’” said Wrzosinski. “But they kept insisting.”
Witold Wrzosinski is the director of Warsaw’s largest Jewish cemetery and a member of the city’s small Jewish community. (Shira Li Bartov)
The students wanted to prove that they could dig without breaking Jewish law. So they studied it, returning to the rabbis over and over to demonstrate that their excavations would not disrupt the original soil.
The rabbis were suspicious, said Wrzosinski. How could the students be trusted to differentiate between old and new earth? But eventually, they allowed a survey on a small patch of land in the cemetery, watched closely by Aleksander Schwarz from the Rabbinical Commission.
Schwarz had distinct credibility with Poland’s Jewish leaders. A specialist in Jewish cemetery and burial law, he has served the commission for 25 years, mostly overseeing searches of unmarked graves in death camps like Sobibor and Belzec. Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich sent Schwarz to live for days at these camps, supervising archaeologists as they drew the historic borders of burial sites while ensuring that they met religious rules.
Before the project on Okopowa Street, Schwarz had never taught archaeologists to work in a Jewish cemetery. But he agreed to it. Over the past four years, with funding from Poland’s Cultural Heritage Foundation, he has trained senior archaeologists and a rotating group of about 30 students. Everyone has to pass through his lectures and learn to dig under his eye, said Schwarz, who calls himself “a very demanding person.”
He tempers the typical archaeologist’s appetite to dig deep. Instead, he teaches them to interpret soil, a practice of care and imagination. The historical level of the cemetery lies only 20 to 30 centimeters below the surface. Students are never to disturb a grave — and if they happen on human remains, they must quickly block off the area and leave their discovery untouched. One mistake here could prompt Schwarz to end the project.
“We have trained them not to pick up any bones,” he said. “They work a bit like forensic technicians. If they find anything that is very shallow, a bone or a fragment of a bone, then they call me — or I’m already there — and the commission makes a decision about what happens.”
Gravestones under restoration at Warsaw’s largest Jewish cemetery, September 2024. (Shira Li Bartov)
The students were spurred by an early victory: They uncovered a cobblestone path from the cemetery’s original layer. As far as Wrzosinski knows, no one in Warsaw remembered this path ever existing. Now it is an ordinary part of the place again, near the entrance, gently guiding visitors between the graves.
Gradually, the students were allowed to work in more and more sections of the cemetery. They found fallen, buried tombstones and the names of people buried there. Some of these records did not exist anywhere else, since the Nazis destroyed the pre-war cemetery archive and many Jewish birth, marriage and death certificates.
Some discoveries remain mysterious. Nineteenth-century gravestones that turned out to be half-buried had surprises waiting just below the surface, such as sculptures of squirrels and dragons that looked unfamiliar on Polish Jewish graves, said Wrzosinski. Rabbis are still interpreting whether they had any symbolic significance.
There were also remnants of war, like bullets and shells, bullet holes in gravestones and a pistol from the Warsaw Uprising that was typical of the Polish Underground. One day in July 2020, the students discovered an unexploded German mortar just seven centimeters below the surface. Police evacuated the cemetery and a bomb squad quickly removed it without any damage.
Kacper Konofał, a 23-year-old archaeology student working in the cemetery, is writing his bachelor’s thesis about an uncovered collection of glass vessels, likely used for the ritual washing of bodies. For Konofał, the project has opened access to a world that only lived in vague stories from his childhood. His great-grandmother used to speak about her childhood friend, who was Jewish, and her father, who carried Jews to Sobibor in his cart on German orders.
“When I arrived there on the first day, it was something extraordinary — a calm, quiet, almost magical world behind the wall, in the center of a huge city,” said Konofał.
Wrzosinski also discovered this world as a student, long before becoming the cemetery’s director. Growing up as a secular Jew in Warsaw during the 1980s and ‘90s, he always knew he had family buried in the cemetery, but he never went there. Without a registry, there was no way to look for graves — and without knowing the Hebrew alphabet, there was no way to read them.
Wrzosinski made his way to studying Hebrew at the University of Warsaw. In 2006, near the end of his degree, he saw a job ad seeking someone to clean and index the cemetery. He began the ongoing endeavor to catalog every gravestone in an online database. So far, Wrzosinski and his colleagues have indexed 82,372 names and inscriptions.
He found pleasure in decoding the language of the stones, where Polish and Jewish life intertwined: Hebrew letters, written in Yiddish to spell Polish surnames. Then, in 2008, he found his great-great-grandfather.
As in many Jewish cemeteries in regions ravaged by the Nazis, most of the cemetery in Warsaw remains in disarray. (Shira Li Bartov)
Wrzosinski knew he would eventually see the graves of his ancestors, and he supposed it would be satisfying to know where they were. But the discovery changed him more than he expected.
“When I stepped on that stone and I cleaned it, and I realized that’s my ancestor, I felt something stronger, different,” said Wrzosinski. “Kind of a sense of belonging to this weird place — just an orphaned stone in a neglected forest, and it’s somehow mine. I needed to take a few deep breaths and stop for a moment.”
Now, Wrzosinski has found seven direct relatives to visit in the cemetery. He believes that his great-grandfather lies in one of the mass graves, although he cannot know for certain. Through his database and the efforts of the student archaeologists, he is gratified to watch other visitors experience the same moment of connection that he did.
Even during its long abandonment, the cemetery remained important for many who experienced the loneliness of being Jewish in postwar Poland. Patrycja Dołowy, a writer and artist who formerly headed Warsaw’s Jewish Community Center, grew up like Wrzosinski in Warsaw during the 1980s. Being Jewish was mostly an unspoken subject in her family, both publicly and at home.
But she saw the wildly overgrown cemetery as a “secret garden,” a refuge for Polish Jews that mirrored the obfuscated memory in their own homes. “Those stones, the matzevot, the names on them were covered by nature, not so visible — a little bit like in our memories, the names of our ancestors, and these gaps in our family histories,” said Dołowy.
Dołowy said her community was happy to see the archaeological restoration, of a piece with other efforts to revive Jewish heritage across Poland. She also believes the wildlife that grew over the cemetery is inextricable from its story, even as the trees continue to battle against the graves.
“Nature heals what was so difficult, so unimaginable,” said Dołowy. “In my opinion, this overgrowth should be an important part of places like cemeteries. But there’s always a dilemma, because nature is also destroying the graves.”
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