Sirens wailed at noon while Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Zygmunt Stępiński, head of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, laid wreaths at the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes Memorial in central Warsaw.
A wreath was also laid on behalf of the Polish president. The Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, prayed for the dead.
The annual commemorations of the uprising, in which Jewish fighters took up arms against Poland’s Nazi German invaders, have typically included wailing sirens, tolling church bells and crowds holding yellow paper daffodils in a sign of remembrance.
Commemorative events have been scaled down this year due to the global coronavirus pandemic and Poland's containment measures.
Notwithstanding, the POLIN Museum has launched the 8th edition of its successful Daffodil Campaign. Due to the restrictions and stay-at-home orders, POLIN volunteers cannot hand out daffodils on city streets, but the museum has provided an origami pattern and instructions online for anyone wishing to make a daffodil and so participate in the remembrance campaign.
As part of the commemorations, the Museum has also posted online an exhibition, an audio feature and a series of documentaries.
On Friday, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance paid tribute to the heroes of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ahead of the anniversary.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which broke out on April 19, 1943 and lasted until May 16, was the first uprising in German Nazi-occupied Europe and the largest act of armed resistance by Jews in World War II. It is estimated that about 13,000 insurgents died in the ghetto during the revolt.
Some surviving Jewish combatants later fought in the Warsaw Uprising, launched by Poland's underground Home Army (AK) on August 1, 1944.
The Warsaw ghetto, established in April 1940, was the largest of the many ghettos which the Germans set up across Poland to isolate the Jewish population after invading the country in September 1939.
The Polish president in December 2018 paid tribute to the last surviving Warsaw ghetto fighter who died in Israel at the age of 94.
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Source: PAP, IAR, polin.pl