The Warsaw Telephone Directory, 1939-40.
"An outwardly unremarkable artefact", but an extraordinarily valuable research resource, the "key that led to the groundbreaking database", allowing families to trace the details of the Jewish owners of properties seized by the Nazis. 1/
"An outwardly unremarkable artefact", but an extraordinarily valuable research resource, the "key that led to the groundbreaking database", allowing families to trace the details of the Jewish owners of properties seized by the Nazis. 1/
This directory, which includes many of the city's outlying suburbs, was published within months of the outbreak of war, and clearly and prosaically documents the size of Warsaw's enormous Jewish community at that precise moment in time, on the eve of the Nazi apocalypse. 2/
Warsaw's pre-war Jewish population of more than 350,000 constituted about 30% of the city's total population, the second largest such community in the world, second only to New York City. 3/
When Soviet troops liberated the devastated Polish capital on January 17, 1945 the surviving population was just 174,000 - less than 6% of the pre- war population. Approximately 11,500 of those survivors were Jews, a survival rate of 3%, 97% of all Warsaw Jews were murdered. 4/
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