World War II & Jewish Wrocław

Wrocław lies in the very heart of Europe. For centuries, it was one of the main centers of Jewish life in Central Europe. Jews alongside Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians were shaping the prosperity of what was one of the richest cities in the German Empire. Though expelled in the Middle Ages, they returned and 19th-century Wrocław became a major center of Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment, a movement that changed Judaism forever. Without the generations of rabbis from Wrocław it would be simply impossible to describe modern Judaism.

This diverse and rich world came to a sudden end in the 1930s when the Nazis took over. Humiliated and persecuted, the Jews of Wrocław soon shared the fate of other European Jews murdered by the Germans and their accomplices during the Holocaust. But the tides of war changed and in 1945 the Third Reich crumbled in the face of the ferocious and bloodthirsty Red Army. Adolf Hitler ordered Wrocław to be turned into a Festung – a fortress to guard the dream of the thousand-year Reich till the last drop of blood and the last bullet. As a result, the city has become the scene of one of the most fierce urban battles of World War II, eventually falling to the Allies even later than Berlin itself.

Join us to learn about Wrocław’s Jewish past and present and the destruction of the city at the end of WWII. Walk through the most interesting area in the city center – the four denominations district. Discover a place where you can not only learn about Wrocław’s long and fascinating history, but also witness the cultural revival and changes that happened here in the last 20 years.