Guided story · 7 chapters · ~6 min

The vanished Jewish cities of Eastern Europe — and what remains

On the eve of WWII, one in three Warsaw residents was Jewish. What happened — and what is still standing?

Preview the chaptersOptional overview · 1931–2014

Chapter 01 Vilnius (Vilna) 1931

Vilnius, Jerusalem of Lithuania

Jews settled in Vilnius from the 14th century; it became the home of the Vilna Gaon (Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, 1720–1797), the emblem of Lithuanian Torah learning and Hasidism's great opponent. The city held over a hundred synagogues and prayer houses and published six daily Jewish papers; in 1925 YIVO chose it — over Warsaw and New York — for its headquarters. The 1931 census counted 54,600 Jews in a city of 195,100; by January 1941 there were 58,263, more than a quarter of the city.

Chapter 02 Warsaw 1939

Warsaw: the biggest Jewish city in Europe

In 1939 Warsaw held 375,000 Jews — 30 percent of the city, the largest Jewish community in Europe and second in the world only to New York. It was the metropolis of Yiddish literature, of Bund politics, of Jewish cinema and cabaret; a city with its own newspapers, theaters, schools, and sports clubs. To be a Varshaver Jew was an identity as specific as being a Parisian.

This section addresses destruction and loss. It is one chapter, not the whole story — continue to where communities are growing today

Chapter 03 Lodz 1940

Łódź: the industrial city

Łódź grew from a village to a textile giant with about 230,000–233,000 Jews in 1939 — roughly a third of the city. The ghetto established there in February 1940 — renamed Litzmannstadt by the occupier, a name recorded here only as occupier vocabulary — was the second-largest in occupied Europe; some 204,000 people passed through it. Most were murdered at Chełmno and Auschwitz; around 10,000 survived, in place or elsewhere.

Chapter 04 Tykocin 1939

The shtetl world

Beyond the big cities lay hundreds of market towns where Jews were 30 to 90 percent of the residents — a civilization of wooden synagogues, heder schoolrooms, market days, and klezmer weddings. Tykocin's 1642 Baroque synagogue, its walls painted with prayers, survives as a museum and a window into that world. All told, Poland in 1939 held about 3.0–3.3 million Jews — nine to ten percent of the country.

This section addresses destruction and loss. It is one chapter, not the whole story — continue to where communities are growing today

Chapter 05 Vilnius (Vilna) 1941

Destruction, 1941–1945

Vilnius's community was annihilated at Ponary (Paneriai) and in the ghetto liquidations; only a few thousand of some 58,000 survived. Salonika, from the Mediterranean route, lost about 46,000 deported — roughly 95 percent murdered. Poland overall: around 90 percent of its 3.3 million Jews were murdered. These are the documented numbers, given with their sources and without dramatization. They are paired, deliberately, with the two stops that follow.

Chapter 06 Warsaw

What remains

The cemeteries: Warsaw's Okopowa Street and Łódź's 43-hectare Jewish cemetery, the largest in Europe. Synagogue buildings repurposed or restored, and more than 1,200 documented wooden-synagogue sites. YIVO itself, re-founded in New York in 1940, still doing its work. And thousands of yizkor books — memorial volumes written by survivors for their towns — now digitized and searchable. The civilization is gone; its records are not.

Chapter 07 Warsaw 2014

Revival, 1990 to today

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews — opened to the public in 2013, its core exhibition unveiled in October 2014 on the Muranów site of the ghetto — recorded more than 5 million visits in its first decade. Around it: JCC Warsaw, the annual Kraków Jewish Culture Festival (running since 1988), and a new generation reclaiming roots their grandparents were forced to hide. The story also tells honestly of March 1968, when some 13,000 Jews were driven out of Poland — the revival grew in that shadow, and says so. Continuity and creativity, not only loss.

The story in one view

A chapter sequence, not a reconstructed travel route.

Story complete

7 chapters, one connected history.

“One in three Warsaw residents was Jewish. The world that was, the destruction — told with care — and what remains standing.”

In 1881 almost no child on earth spoke Hebrew at home. Today millions argue about football in it. Who flipped the switch?

Sources and review details

Reviewed 2026-07-30