The Jewish Combat Organization, or ZOB, was headquartered in the recently unearthed bunker. After the Germans discovered this hiding place in 1943, about 120 of the Jewish fighters there died by suicide

Children’s shoes and eating utensils were found this month in an archaeological dig in the bunker of Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Jacek Konik, an archaeologist and historian with the Warsaw Ghetto Museum who heads the research at the site, said one of the items found was a shoe belonging to a 10-year-old girl that had been in the ground for nearly 80 years. A smaller shoe belonging to a different child was found next to it.

The excavations began in early June in the Muranow district of the Polish capital, in the basement of what had been an apartment building at 18 Mila St., made famous as the eponymous title of Leon Uris’s 1961 novel “Mila 18.” The tenement itself had been destroyed in 1939.

The Jewish Combat Organization (known by its Polish acronym, ZOB) was headquartered in the bunker. After the Germans discovered this hiding place about 120 of the Jewish fighters there, including Anielewicz, died by suicide, on May 8, 1943. Their bodies remained in the bunker. After the war, a mound made from the rubble of the building was placed on top of the mass grave and a commemorative stone with an inscription in Polish and Yiddish was installed on top. In 2006 a new obelisk with inscriptions in Polish Yiddish and English was added, with the names of 51 Jewish fighters whose identities have been confirmed.

Items connected to Holocaust victims are found in Poland from time to time, even decades after the war ended. In recent excavations at the site of the Sobibor death camp, thousands of objects and personal items were found that belonged to Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers at the site. The use of methods and tools from the field of archaeology – which were originally intended to be used to find objects from thousands of years ago – to discover objects that are only decades old has produced a large quantity of finds in recent years.

The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is still under construction and is scheduled to open next year, marking the 80th anniversary of the uprising. Prof. Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the museum’s chief historian. The museum is already operating online as well as organizing seminars, ceremonies and research projects.

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