Sirens will sound and paper daffodils will fill the streets of the Polish capital on Thursday to mark 75 years since hundreds of young Jews took up arms against Nazi German forces in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
The Jewish fighters launched their attack on April 19, 1943 after the Nazis began deporting the surviving residents of the Jewish district they had set up after invading Poland.
The insurgents preferred to die fighting instead of in a gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp where the Nazis had already sent more than 300,000 Warsaw Jews.
Polish President Andrzej Duda is due to visit a Jewish cemetery in the morning, before taking part in the official ceremony at the Ghetto Heroes Monument.
Scheduled for the same time on the site of the former ghetto is a march organised by anti-fascist organisations, which will end at the Umschlagplatz monument where Jews were rounded up and taken to Treblinka.
In the afternoon, at a square in the district, the Shalom foundation plans to inaugurate the Tree of Tears, a weeping willow whose leaves are meant to symbolise the tears of Jewish mothers who handed over their children to Catholic mothers in order to save their lives.
But the most visible symbol for Warsaw residents will be the daffodil pins on their clothes, a recent tradition that gains momentum with every year.
