April 19th marks the 65th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, when the last residents of the Jewish Ghetto rose up and ultimately fueled a revolt against Nazi power. The Ghetto wasrazed following the revolt, its residents killed. Today these walls are all the remain of the compound as skyscrapers and westward looking capitalism have taken its place. The walls still stand thanks to the efforts of this man.

"When the authorities wanted to tear down the wall, I told them that this wasn’t a wall they coulddemolish. And I told them if you do this, it means you are all anti-Semites. This wall has a history. People died here of hunger and Poles on the other side threw food to them. If they were caught by the Germans, it meant their deaths."

Mieczyslaw remembers the war is his past. The 87-year-old now lives next to the wall. An amateur historian for decades, he struggled to preserve the Ghetto remains, writing letters to politicians and repairing the crumbling wall.

"It’s because this is history. One day I’m going to die. But today while I’m still alive fighting, nobody seems to care. Just think about when I am gone! I’ve been waging this battle for 30 years, we could’ve built a pyramid by now. That’s history. And a nation without history, whether it’s good or bad, will after a time cease to be a nation."

Mieczyslaw is not Jewish and never lived in a Ghetto. But the pain, hunger and fear, and dirt there hit close to home. After the war, he spent three years as a POW in a Soviet gulag, another prison painful to remember but impossible to forget.