Blue sky view, from aleja Jana Pawla 11, prison courtyard to Symbolic Wall with dates 1905, 1939, 1944, Pawiak Museum, Warsaw


Pawiak Prison, taking its name from the street on which it stood, ulica Pawia ('Peacock Street'), was built 1829-1835. During the 1863 Uprising against Imperial Russia, Poland then being partitioned, the prison served as a transfer camp for Poles sentenced by Russia for deportation to Siberia. After Polish Independence in 1918, Pawiak became Warsaw's main prison for male criminals. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, it became a Gestapo prison, through which Approximately 100,000 men and 200,000 women passed, members of the Polish Home Army, political prisoners and civilian hostages. An estimated 37,000 prisoners were executed there and 60,000 sent to concentration and death camps. On 21 August 1944, during the Warsaw Uprising, the prison was burnt down and blown up by the Germans, although half of the original gateway, with barbed wire, survived together with a tree that quickly became a memorial to the victims of the Gestapo Prison. After World War 2, the prison was not rebuilt. In 1965 the Pawiak Museum, outlining the prison's history, especially during World War 2, opened in its surviving basement. In the old courtyard of the prison. A concrete wall with sandstone blocks in the form of symbolic sculptures and ruins, seen here from aleja Jana Pawla 11, across the old prison courtyard, surround the grounds of the museum.


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Photo credit: © robert harrison / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No

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