POLAND: Shining Granite

In 1943, Adolf Hitler felt fairly confident about the future. He sent an order to Sweden for grey granite; he planned a giant victory monument in Berlin.

In that same year, at dawn on the day before Passover, six Nazi tanks and a column of infantry moved into the Warsaw ghetto. They were making a routine roundup for the concentration camps and gas chambers. They penetrated as far as the ghetto's main street. Suddenly, windows and doorways erupted fire; from the housetops, grenades and gasoline were hurled on the tanks. The infantry were decimated; the tank crews burned alive.

The Passover ambush was the signal for a general uprising in the Warsaw ghetto; 50,000 Jews, all that remained of half a million originally herded behind the ghetto walls, had decided that, since they were to die, they would not die tamely. The Germans brought re-enforcements from Galicia; waves of bombers swept over the defenseless ghetto, raining incendiaries and high explosive. It took them 42 days to level every building. A few hundred Jews—all that were left of the 50,000 in the ghetto six weeks before—escaped through the sewers to join the guerrillas.

Last week, on the fifth anniversary of the ghetto uprising, 12,000 Jews assembled on the spot where the first shots were fired. There they dedicated a monument to the heroes of the ghetto and to the 3,500,000 other Jews killed in Poland.

Delegations of Jews from 20 nations, including the U.S., laid wreaths and banners against the monument—a wall built of broken bricks from the ghetto's rubble piles. Mounted in a front niche was a bronze plaque showing armed men & women straining toward freedom.

These were moving symbols to the Jews of Warsaw. But what they liked best, perhaps, was the shining granite that sheathed the monument's wall: it was some of the Swedish granite that Adolf Hitler had ordered for his monument in Berlin.