On a recent visit to Kraków, having decided this wasn’t the trip to visit Auschwitz concentration camp, I found World War II to be so much a part of the city’s identity to discover that my thinking you could avoid this history simply but avoiding Auschwitz had been naïve.
Kraków, one of Poland’s oldest cities and its capital for over 500 years, covers many fascinating periods of history, with sites from Wawel Castle to Nowa Huta as reminders of early medieval history and life under the iron curtain respectively.
But the dominating historic thread we encountered on our trip was what happened here from 1939 and the few years following that. We went to visit Schindler’s Factory where an excellent and very detailed exhibit is currently running on the Nazi occupation of the city. It took a mere six days for the city to be taken, to go from Polish to German. The Old Town’s Main Square, one of Europe’s largest medieval town squares and a hub of trade and activity since the 13th century, was renamed Adolf Hitler-Platz. It felt so unreal it could have been something out of a film script.
The “Jewish Quarter” of Kraków is Kazimierz. This was originally an independent city and for a long time it was a place of coexistence between Polish and Jewish cultures. But Jewish inhabitants were relocated into the Krakow ghetto (in the city’s Podgórze district) under Nazi occupation where they were held until “The Final Solution” began in 1942, where most were sent to their deaths at Bełżec, Płaszów or Auschwitz.
Under communist rule the neighbourhood was neglected and remaining Jews in Poland faced further persecution. But recently the neighbourhood is experiencing some revival. Craft shops and cafes line quiet streets and the Jewish Culture Festival is hosted here every year, with visitors from around the world. It is hard how to pinpoint how these streets feel, but we settle on a sort of inevitable ‘emptiness’. A void between how alive with life it would have been before, and all those families no longer existing. A guide book states the Jewish community of Kazimierz is now but 100 odd people. Three synagogues are positioned very close to each other and I pay a little to wander around a lap of the cemetery at Remuh Synagogue.
The Empty Chairs Memorial marks the spot where Jewish people were rounded up to be relocated into the ghetto. Not knowing what they were waiting for, some brought chairs with them while they waited. Each steel chair of the memorial represents 1000 victims. Children are clambering on the furniture in much the same interactive way to The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
And now for probably the spookiest remnant of all, The Liban Quarry. A place used as a labour camp by the Nazis. In a vicious irony, this limestone quarry had been owned and run by two wealthy Jewish families in the late nineteenth century.
And then whilst filming Schindler’s List in 1992, Spielberg used it as the setting for the nearby Płaszów concentration camp, out of respect not wanting to film in the actual camp. Therefore barracks and watchtowers were constructed. Although mostly removed after shooting, they weren’t entirely. There is a road made of Jewish tombstones running along the bottom which are in fact part of the film set, but no more than a recreation of reality.
Today, the space is abandoned by the city, with trees and overgrowing fauna, some wildlife with even rumours of roaming wild horses, and we see evidence of it not being somewhere you’d want to hang about out night, with burnt out bonfires, graffitied ruins and empty bottles.
It’s an altogether unsettling place. But I’m not sure what could be done with it.
History isn’t found in designated spaces. Its reminders sprawl through cities. And through its buildings and bodies.
Interesting article on how unlike other Polish cities, Kraków made it ‘unscathed’ (I think/hope they mean the architecture…) during World War II: http://culture.pl/en/article/how-krakow-made-it-unscathed-through-wwii
Natasha Self 