Entitled Remembrance and Future, the event took place at the Wielki Theatre/Polish National Opera in Warsaw on Wednesday night, state news agency PAP reported.
In attendance were Polish President Andrzej Duda, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier with their wives, as well as Polish lawmakers, foreign diplomats and survivors from the Holocaust, according to officials.
Addressing the gathering, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Culture Minister Piotr Gliński said that the concert was taking place “a mere few hundred metres” from the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
Europe’s biggest ghetto, it was “a neighbourhood where the Germans created hell on Earth for hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, and Jews of Warsaw, who were Polish citizens,” Gliński added.
‘Germans sought to obliterate the identity of Poles and Polish Jews’
Gliński said that the Wielki Theatre/Polish National Opera building “was bombed by Germany in 1939 and finally destroyed in 1944, and 350 Polish civilians were killed amid the ruins in August 1944.”
He added: “After both Warsaw uprisings, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, the Germans deliberately and systematically sought to burn down the city to kill the heart and identity of the two nations that put up a resistance to them ... to obliterate for centuries the identity of Poles and Polish Jews."
Gliński went on to say: “The occupiers turned Polish people into slaves and victims and condemned the Jews, including some 3 million Polish citizens, to physical extermination. In all, the Germans killed almost 6 million Polish citizens in occupied Poland. To this day, they have never atoned for these crimes, ruins and wrongs.”
The deputy prime minister stressed that as they started their insurrection on April 19, 1943, the Jewish fighters symbolically hoisted two flags, the white-and-red flag of Poland and the white-and-blue flag of the Jewish Military Union.
He said: “This image of two flags, a white-and-red one and a white-and-blue one, billowing together over the fighting ghetto, became a symbol of the Polish and Jewish wartime fates, which were inextricably intertwined.”
‘Warsaw uprisings eventually brought victory to our nations’
Gliński said that although both the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising “were violently put down,” yet years later “they brought victory and strength, and power, to both our national and state communities.”
He stated: “Today, as we pay homage to the tragic Warsaw Ghetto fighters, we bow our heads before the sacrifices made by the Jewish nation and remember the losses suffered by Poland. Their memory must endure, so that they are not repeated. Never Again.”
Polish-Jewish Youth Symphony Orchestra
Wednesday’s concert comprised a performance by the Polish-Israeli Youth Symphony Orchestra, which was set up especially for this purpose, according to officials.
Bringing together young musicians from Warsaw’s Fryderyk Chopin University of Music and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, the ensemble played Tenebrae, a specially commissioned new piece by Polish composer Elżbieta Sikora, and Symphony No. 8, Op. 83, ‘Kwiaty Polskie’ (Polish Flowers) by the Polish-Jewish born Mieczysław Weinberg, the PAP news agency reported.
Earlier on Wednesday evening, the presidents of Poland, Israel and Germany lit memory candles at Warsaw’s Nożyk Synagogue to mark 80 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, according to officials.
Poland’s Duda, Israel’s Herzog and Germany’s Steinmeier also unveiled a plaque to commemorate a visit to the synagogue by the Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1946, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, gov.pl