One map superimposed on another, a city superimposed over the other. What is the point of recreating this non-existing city? Do contemporary Varsovians need this? Does knowing about “Aryan” trams passing through the ghetto? Should the modern-day Warsaw resident really know where the rubble from the annihilated ghetto was deposited? Should the former borders of the closed Jewish district bear any importance to us today? On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in cooperation with Polish Center for Holocaust Research, Forum for Dialogue and Państwomiasto café club offered an unusual method of anniversary celebrations: in the form of map readings. The meeting was held in connection with the reissuing “The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City”, a book by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak. The date of the meeting was on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the ghetto uprising – April 18, 2013. Together with Paweł E. Weszpiński, cartographer responsible for maps from the aforementioned book, Beata Chomątowska from Stacja Muranów Association and Jakub Petelewicz, member of Polish Center for Holocaust Research affiliated at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, we discussed the purpose of recreating maps of the perished city and their significance for contemporary Varsovians.

Along with the book “The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City” we get a unique supplement: the Warsaw Ghetto Atlas. Ten sheets; fourteen maps. A unique cartographic project that catalogs in minuscule details the borders of the closed Jewish district and its scope; it provides addresses, locates the gates, smuggling areas, nursing homes, orphanages, soup kitchens. We see the past and present street layout, ghetto rubble deposit zones and routes of the “Jewish” trams as well as a dense network of the “Aryan” ones. Maps present the scale and the artificiality of the forcefully created “Jewish residential district” in the very heart of the city of Warsaw.