Archaeologists and construction crews preparing the ground for the new Twórcza Twarda cultural center on Twarda Street in central Warsaw uncovered the remains of the Venus chocolate factory: ceramic praline molds, pots and bottles for flavor essences, fragments of glassware, paper labels that once wrapped bonbons, and decorative floor tiles bearing a burgundy-on-white wave motif. The Polish Press Agency first reported the discovery.
Experts from the Warsaw City Conservation Office linked the site at Twarda 10 to the pre-war factory run by the Jewish Shapira family, which the Germans destroyed during World War II. “This is an exceptional find,” said the office, according to the Polish Press Agency. Officials added that an administrative room still showed an elaborate ceramic border, evidence that even utilitarian spaces were built with style.
Hanokh David Shapiro opened Venus in 1918. The plant stood opposite the Nożyk Synagogue, inside what later became the Warsaw Ghetto. “It’s exciting. My grandfather and grandmother left there before the war when they established the factory in Tel Aviv,” said his grandson Dr. David Shapira.
Another grandson, David Hanoch Shapira, 76, recalled that his father fled Warsaw in August 1939 “taking many sweets with them to bribe the Germans” and reached Mandatory Palestine a year later. “We knew there was a factory named Venus, but we didn’t know where it was located,” he said, adding that the family planned a roots journey to the site.
Magdalena Łań of the Warsaw Office for the Preservation of Monuments underlined the city’s confectionery tradition. “Pre-war Warsaw residents loved sweets. People went to the cafes of Lours, Wedel, Semanedi, Blikle, and confectioners invented new sweet delicacies,” she said, according to the Polish Press Agency. Advertising at the time urged consumers with slogans such as “Sugar strengthens” and “Mother, don’t spare the sugar. Sugar is the most effective nutrient.”
The find rekindled interest in Warsaw’s confectionery past. The Wedel plant founded in 1851 still operated on Zamoyskiego Street, but before the war dozens of smaller firms dotted the city, including Franciszek Fuks and his sons on Topiel 12, the Kiełbasiński brothers’ Franboli factory on Śnieżna 3–4, Jan Fruziński on Chocimska 5, and Jan Grabowski on Narbutta 25a/27. “He had a very wide offer … Fruziński was Wedel’s biggest rival,” said Łań.
Meir Bulka, a researcher of Jewish heritage in Poland, called the discovery “a time capsule” and urged developers to “investigate the ground with technological tools, because it’s amazing how these items waited for us for over eighty years for us to find them.”
The location lay within the wartime ghetto boundaries, so municipal conservators ordered that construction continue only in coordination with heritage authorities. Similar precautions were taken last year when remnants of Janusz Korczak’s orphanage were unearthed nearby.
For now, shards of porcelain molds and faded candy stickers rested in labeled crates, their chocolate aroma gone but their story newly sweet. The excavation director promised further details as the dig progressed, and the Shapira descendants hoped the information would deepen a family narrative stretching from inter-war Warsaw to today’s Tel Aviv and Ra’anana.
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