THE last documented secrets of the Warsaw Ghetto may lie buried in iron caskets under the foundations of what is now the Chinese Embassy, according to archaeologists who have started to dig in the diplomatic compound.

The search coincides with the 60th anniversary of the Jewish uprising against the Nazis. A small number of survivors, who for three weeks in 1943 struggled with smuggled pistols and grenades against the Germans, have been returning to the Polish capital for the commemorations.

Marek Edelman, 82, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, recently disclosed details that could identify the site of the hidden chronicle of the ghetto’s dying days. That has prompted the archaeological search.

Throughout the existence of the ghetto — by 1943 at least 350,000 Jews had died there of starvation and disease or had been deported to concentration camps — Emanuel Ringelblum, an historian, led a group of researchers collecting thousands of documents recording everyday life in the community. This included diaries, theatre programmes, tram tickets, doctors’ reports, sketches and underground newspapers. The material was used as the basis of reports to the Polish government-in- exile in London.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, now Germany’s premier literary critic, remembers being approached by Ringelblum to copy correspondence between the Jewish council and the German authorities. That became part of the missing archive. All the documentation was packed into ten metal containers and two milk churns and buried in three different locations. Two of the hiding places were found in 1946 and 1950 and their contents are on the list of the world’s most valuable documents published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

The third site remained a mystery and many historians assumed that its contents had been destroyed when the ghetto was razed. But now Mr Edelman, who after the war became a prominent doctor and fierce critic of communist rule, has remembered fragments of a conversation with Ringelblum’s associates.

Ringelblum survived the ghetto uprising. He went into hiding, but was found and killed by the Nazis in 1944.

All the clues seem to point to a leafy corner just outside the former ghetto terrain. The Chinese authorities acquired the plot in the 1960s and built their embassy there. As soon as Dr Edelman offered his clues, President Kwasniewski of Poland set about persuading the Chinese Government to allow an archaeological team to dig within the embassy compound.

The ghetto uprising, which is central to the story of Roman Polanski’s latest Oscar-winning film, The Pianist, ended with the killing of almost all the remaining 60,000 Jews. Only two monuments mark the area, but it remains a powerful and controversial place, illustrating not only the brutality of the Nazi regime but also the Jewish ability to rebel against the Nazi- imposed Final Solution. “It was the first time in occupied Europe that civilians put up armed resistance against Nazi occupiers,” Dr Edelman said.

This gave him, as a survivor, an unusual moral authority in Poland. When General Jaruzelski, the communist leader, declared martial law in the winter of 1981, Dr Edelman became an outspoken supporter of the banned Solidarity movement, knowing that it would be politically impossible to jail a prominent ghetto survivor.

More recently he argued the case for the Iraq war. The Polish Government supported the war, but many Poles, swayed by the Pope, were opposed to it. “The war was not about oil, it was about defending freedom,” Dr Edelman said. “We can see that the world has not fully learnt the lessons of the Holocaust . . . dictatorship is a disease that can spread if unchecked, whether in Iraq or in Europe.”

A brutal history

April 1943: Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Fewer than 100 Jews survived. Ghetto razed shortly afterwards

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