Skwer Willy'ego Brandta, Warsaw

Before you is the Willy Brandt Monument, a brick memorial at the meeting of Edelmana and Karmelicka streets in Muranów. Its form echoes the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, and the plaque on its southern face carries Wiktoria Czechowska-Antoniewska’s relief of Brandt on his knees. The scene recalls the seventh of December nineteen seventy, when the German chancellor laid a wreath there, stepped back, and knelt without warning.

His act became Germany’s public admission of guilt and a tribute to Warsaw’s murdered Jews and to all victims of the Second World War. Piotr Drachal designed the monument, unveiled on the sixth of December two thousand, shortly before the gesture’s thirtieth anniversary. Gerhard Schröder and Jerzy Buzek attended the ceremony, alongside Brandt’s widow and Günter Grass, who had witnessed the original moment.