Monument sights in Warsaw
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Ghetto Heroes Monument
About 200m north of Pawiak Prison Museum, on the corner of ul Anielewicza and ul Zamenhofa, is a tree-lined park, which in summer is dotted with sunbathers. It's an incongruously peaceful setting for the Ghetto Heroes Monument, a memorial to the thousands who lost their lives in the ill-fated Ghetto Uprising of 1943. The grey stone tower is built of Swedish granite, originally imported by the Nazis to build their own victory monument.
On one side a bronze relief depicts a crush of doomed but defiant insurgents; on the other is a scene of martyrdom - a Jewish elder clutching a Torah scroll leads a group of his people, the sinister outlines of Nazi helmets and bayonets visi…
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B
Sigismund III Vasa Column
A natural spot from which to start exploring the Old Town is triangular Castle Square (Plac Zamkowy). Attracting snap-happy tourists by the hundreds each day is the square's centrepiece, the Sigismund III Vasa Column. This lofty 22m-high monument to the king who moved the capital from Kraków to Warsaw was erected by the king's son in 1644 and is Poland's second-oldest secular monument (after Gdańsk's Neptune). It was knocked down during WWII, but the statue survived and was placed on a new column four years after the war. The original, shrapnel-scarred granite column now lies along the south wall of the Royal Castle.
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C
Umschlagplatz Monument
The Umschlagplatz Monument marks the site of the umschlagplatz (literally, 'taking-away place'), the railway terminus from which Warsaw's Jews were transported to Treblinka. The rectangle monument's marble walls are carved with more than 3000 Jewish forenames, from Aba to Zygmunt, and the stark message: 'Along this path of suffering and death over 300,000 Jews were driven in 1942-43 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps'.
Its shape is symbolic of the cattle trucks into which the prisoners were herded.
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D
Monument to the Warsaw Uprising
Directly opposite the cathedral stands one of Warsaw’s most important landmarks, the Monument to the Warsaw Uprising. This bronze tableau depicts Armia Krajowa (AK; Home Army) fighters emerging ghostlike from the shattered brickwork of their ruined city, while others descend through a manhole into the network of sewers. The monument was unveiled on 1 August 1989, the 45th anniversary of the uprising.
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E
Monument to Mordechaj Anielewicz
From the Ghetto Heroes Monument head north along ul Zamenhofa, past a garden with a little mound topped by a simple limestone block, a Monument to Mordechaj Anielewicz, leader of the Ghetto Uprising, who perished in a bunker on this site in 1943.
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F
Monument to Nicolaus Copernicus
The contemplative figure sitting on a plinth south of Warsaw University is a Monument to Nicolaus Copernicus, the great Polish astronomer.
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