Icons of defiance, images of loss: the monument to the ghetto heroes and the semiotics of commemoration

Abstract

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 surviving Polish Jews at the moment of its creation and unveiling. Employing a multimodal social semiotic analytic framework, the research explores the interplay between the Monument’s visual and material dimensions, its spatial context within the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the shifting socio-political landscape of early postwar Poland. The analysis is grounded in theories of collective memory, focusing on the evolution of Jewish memory traditions and the emerging Zionist national mythology. Through detailed semiotic analysis of the Monument and its placement, this thesis argues that Rapoport’s work functioned as a dynamic site of memory, encoding a dialectic of martyrdom and resistance rooted in ancient Jewish tropes yet profoundly shaped by the ideological imperatives of its time. Ultimately, Rapoport’s Monument emerges not merely as an aesthetic or commemorative object, but as an active agent in the reconstruction and negotiation of Jewish memory in the aftermath of the Holocaust.