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Garden of the Righteous to be set up in Warsaw

correspondence by Annalia Guglielmi from Poland

Warsaw, the Wola District were the Garden of the Righteous will be situated

Warsaw, the Wola District were the Garden of the Righteous will be situated

The date of 6 March 2014, second European Day of the Righteous,  will hold a particular meaning in Poland, because is will be the occasion to announce the creation of the Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw, on next 5 June. This was decided during the session of the Honorary Committee for the Celebrations of the Day of Remembrance of the Righteous. This meeting took place on 17 February at the House of Meetings with History, and started with a minute of silence in honor of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first President of the Committee deceased on 28 October of last year, who at the first meeting of the Committee had said: “The endeavour to celebrate the memory of the Righteous is particularly meaningful for our country, which experienced terror under both forms of totalitarianism. The example of those who in the moment of duress have not esitate to rescue others deserves the utmost respect and being reminded of to the next generations.” 

Afterwards the Committee elected a new President, who is Zbigniew Gluza, founder and President of the Karta Foundation. By accepting this nomination, prof. Gluza said he is deeply convinced of the goodness and importance of the Garden, and ensured to do everything in his power to accomplish this project. This was followed by the official nomination as members of the Committee of Urszula Kierszkowska, Mayor of the Wola district, where the Garden will be created, and Tomasz Thun-Janowski, director of the Culture Office of Warsaw City Hall. 

The participation of such distinguished members is particularly important, as it testifies the city’s will to take charge both of the Garden and of its cultural and educational promotion. 
The Garden of Warsaw will retain a universal character and it will refer to the experience of genocide and totalitarianism of the 20th century. Furthermore it will be set up in a historically meaningful area, the Wola district where there was once the Warsaw Ghetto. More precisely, the Garden of the Righteous of Warsaw will be realized in a wide area designed to serve as a city park which is in front of the Church of Saint Augustine, the only one which has remained there among the churches that stood in the Ghetto, a few meters away from the infamous Pawiak jail, where nearly 100,000 prisoners are estimated to have lost their lives from 1943 to 1944 to either police questionings or detention. 

Moreover, a few meters away there is the Museum of the Polish Jews. Thus the Garden will be situated in a place which is particularly significant and loaded with both Jewish and Polish memory. The Garden will look similar to the Milan one, which is deemed to be particularly significant for its “simple and ascetic look”. Also the choice of 5 June as date of the inauguration retains a high symbolic value: in facts on 4 June 2014 we will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first half-free elections in a country of the Eastern block, thus we could say the Wall began to crumble on 4 June 1989 in Poland. Afterwards there was the creation of the Mazowiecky goverment, run by the first non communist prime minister in an Eastern European country. This year on 4 June in Poland there will be great celebrations, to which numerous heads of State have been invited. Furthermore at the Presidential Palace there will be the inauguration of a great exhibition dedicated to Tadeusz Mazowiecki, entitled as “Shutting Down the System”. This wat the inauguration of the Garden and  the memory of the Righteous will be added to the programme of the celebration of the end of  totalitarian rule in Europe. 


At the inauguration of the Garden we will honour six figures who for their walk of life, origin and context in which they operated best represent the universal character of the Garden: Tadeusz Mazowiecki, for his faithfulness to the truth by which he defended human dignity during communism; Jan Karski, the man who tried in vain to inform the great men of the earth about what was happening in the Nazi extermination camps; Marek Edelmann, the chief of the insurrection of the Warsaw ghetto and one of the founders of Solidarność; Antonia Locatelli, who was assassinated because she had warned the world about what was going on in Rwanda, rescuing nearly 300 people of the tutsi ethnic group; Anna Politkowskaja, murdered for her courageous articles in which she reported human rights violations in Putin’s Russia and Chechnya,  and eventually Magda Grodzka – Guzkowska, passed away on past 6 January, who was recognized as a Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem and is called “the angel who rescued the Ghetto’s people”, who is a still little known character. 

Hence, one of the criteria of the Committee is that of honoring, besides the best known figures, also some little known and studied characters, so that as many examples of men and women who opted for Good can be brought about and exit the shade in which they were often cast, which was like condemning them to oblivion.

This is why we decided to prepare educational and popularizing material on the chosen figure, so that between 6 March and 5 June schools can organize seminars, meetings, video productions or laboratories with the studens, so that none of the educational value of the garden gets wasted, above all for the younger celebrations.
At the conclusion of the meeting the Committee decided to change its name from “Honorary Committee for the Celebrations of the Day of the Righteous” into “Committee for t he Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw”, because from then on the celebrations of 6 March will have to be closely joint to the management and implementation of the Garden, and the Committee does not want to remain “honorary”, but on the contrary wishes to be an active entity by all standards,  in which every member is involved personally in dealing with the memory of Good within its field. 

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