The government of Gdansk, Poland has announced it will build a memorial on the site of the city’s former Jewish ghetto, the Jewish Chronicle reported.
Local activists had been campaigning for the monument, pointing out that gentrification of Granary Island, the site of the ghetto, was complicating matters.
In January, activists made a final appeal to build a memorial on the land where the city’s Jewish ghetto once existed with time reportedly running out as the land was being increasingly redeveloped.
The site is now a rundown area on Granary Island in the center of the city, which was formerly used by the Red Mouse Granary. In 1940, the site became Gdansk’s Jewish ghetto, where 600 Jews were deported to before being transferred to concentration camps. The ghetto was destroyed in a bombing in 1945.
The site “is one of the last empty places [on the island] not full of luxury apartments,” musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, told the Chronicle.
The design of the monument will be revealed later in the year. The city is in talks with Gdansk’s small Jewish community over the details of the plan.