Icons of defiance, images of loss: the monument to the ghetto heroes and the semiotics of commemoration
Journal: DSpace repository (University of Tartu)
Year: 2025

This thesis examines the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, unveiled in 1948 in Warsaw’s Muranów district and designed by Natan Rapoport, as a pivotal site of Jewish memory and postwar commemoration. While the Monument is renowned for its dual façades—one dramatizing heroic resistance, the other memorializing martyrdom—it is also a deeply symbolic response to the destruction of Polish Jewry and the Holocaust. This study investigates how the Monument mediated and shaped collective memory among surviv