Blue grey clouds oblique view pre-war building 14 Prozna Street with archive photographs Jewish residents, Warsaw, Poland
14 Prozna Street is a 4-storey brick tenement building built 1896-1900 by Warsaw entrepreneur, Majer Wolanowski. Ironmongers, a department store, tin-plating factory, saddlers and picture-framing shop occupied the ground-floor. The building also included a shelter for homeless Jewish children. In November 1940, Grzybowski Square and part of Prozna Street including Number 14 became enclosed by the Ghetto Wall. In April 1941, Prozna Street was excluded from the Ghetto and Number 14 was occupied by Polish tenants. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Number 14 became the headquarters of the Kilinski Battalion of the Home Army. which, on 2 August 1944, built a barricade between 9 and 14 Prozna Street as they fought 130 Germans and SS troops in a battle for the strategic Past Building on Zilelna Street, which housed Warsaw's telephone and telegraph exchange. At the war's end. most buildings on Prozna Street had survived. Under the post-war Communist government, however, Numbers 1, 3, 8 and 10 were demolished. Number 14, owned by the Polish Government, was deliberately left in a poor state of repair and badly maintained, so the slum conditions would justify demolition. In 1983 a campaign was started to save 14 Prozna Street. A team of activists, known as the 'Guardians of the Cultural Heritage of Warsaw', campaigned to have the building registered as a historical monument. This was achieved in 1987, with Numbers 7 and 9 being restored, with the help of an American investor. In 2001, however, the investor threatened to demolish Number 14 to make way for a new hotel. In 1994 Golda Tencer, founder and director of the Shalom Foundation, appealed for photographs of Polish Jews, for an exhibition commemorating those who died. In 2008 an 'I can still see their faces' exhibition was mounted on the walls of Number 14 as part of the 65th Anniversary commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The tenement houses and empty shops are seen a memorial to the former Jewish residents.
Size: 5472px × 3648px
Location: Pre-war building, 14 Prozna Street, Warsaw, Poland
Photo credit: © robert harrison / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 2, 14, archive, badly, brick, bricks, building, children, ghetto, historic, holocaust, jews, memorial, men, monochrome, oblique, photographs, poland, polish, pre-war, prozna, red, repaired, street, tenement, view, war, warsaw, women, world
