Cobblestones removed from Chłodna Street in Warsaw, Poland. The street was an important east-west thoroughfare in the city of Warsaw. On October 12, 1940, German authorities in Warsaw decreed the establishment of a 1.3-square-mile Jewish ghetto, and required over 400,000 Jews from the city and nearby towns to relocate inside the 10-foot-high wall that bounded it. An approximately 650-foot-long portion of Chłodna Street was contained within the ghetto until December 1941. Afterward, it became an Aryan-only street that divided the ghetto into two sections, with the relatively elite and intellectual population concentrated into the smaller area to the south. Early in 1942, the German authorities constructed a three-story-high, wooden footbridge over Chłodna Street. The bridge diverted most of the ghetto traffic away from the cumbersome series of hinged gates at the intersection of Chłodna and Żelazna Streets. While vehicular traffic could continue using the gates, the pedestrian bridge became the major link between the two sections of the ghetto. Between July 22 and September 12, 1942, approximately 265,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka killing center, and another 35,000 were killed inside the ghetto. With a dramatically reduced population, the living area of the ghetto shrank and many residents relocated near the workshops. As a result, the footbridge was no longer needed and dismantled that August. Although the footbridge existed for only six months, it became a symbolic image for the ghetto as a whole, while the cobbled street below it was representative of non-Jewish Warsaw.
The flooring in the exhibit consists of approximately 2,000 square feet of rectangular paving stones, surrounded by a light gray mortar. The stones are quarried blocks of pink and gray granite with clear flecks of mica throughout, The stones are set into rows, with the vertical joints between stones centered on the stones in the rows above and below. They serve as a walkway within the exhibition, extend underneath a raised walkway, and serve as a base for other exhibition objects.
The cobblestones were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1990 by the Warsaw City Authority.
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Cobblestones from Chłodna Street, which separated the two sections of the Warsaw Ghetto