June 23 2019
Our next stop was the Jewish Quarter of Krakow, known locally as Kazimierz because it was founded in the 14th century by King Kasimir as a gathering place for Jews. By 1939, the Jewish population of Krakow was 70,000, about 25% of the population. In less than 18 months, the Jewish population was about 15,000, and in March 1941, the Krakow Ghetto was established to house what was left of the Jews. More about that later. By the end of the war, the Jewish population of Krakow had been essentially decimated.
After the war, this neighborhood was largely neglected in rebuilding efforts. It was a poor area with a high crime rate. In 1988 a Jewish Cultural Festival was started, and the neighborhood began to turn around. Then the movie Schindler's List was filmed here in 1993, and the place became a tourist attraction.
Today, the Jewish Quarter is the second-largest tourist attraction in Krakow after Old Town. It's a busy, famous part of the city, but the Jewish population remains quite small.
When we were there, a flea market was drawing a lot of people to the square around what was once the kosher slaughterhouse:
The nearby Isaac Synagogue was built in 1644 and named for a donor who was the king's banker. A few months after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Gestapo entered this synagogue and ordered the person in charge that day to burn the Torah scrolls. When he refused, of course they killed him on the spot, and then proceeded to destroy the synagogue's interior. The building itself survived the war, and for years after the war it was used for various non-religious purposes. When communism fell in 1989, it was returned to the Jewish community and is again used as an Orthodox synagogue.
The wrought iron fencing around the bimah (the platform on which the Torah is read) is an exact copy of what was there before the war:
One of the most important Jewish cemeteries in Europe is behind the Remah Synagogue. Many of the graves date back to the 16th century. Of course, during the German occupation of Krakow, Nazis severely damaged the cemetery, even hauling away tombstones and using them as paving stones in the concentration camps or selling them. Imagine the psychological effect of walking on the tombstones of your people while in the camps. The cruelty was beyond belief.
After the war, the cemetery was cleaned of the rubbish that had been thrown there (it was used as a dump) and restored as much as possible. Many gravestones were unearthed, and others were returned to the cemetery from the camps and other places. Although there was no way to know which grave they belonged to, they were at least replaced in an upright position. Of course, what is there now is only a fraction of the thousands that were there prior to the war.
I love the Jewish practice of putting small stones on top of the grave markers, as if to give weight to the spirit of the dead.
The most poignant part of the cemetery for me is this wall made of fragments of broken headstones and known as Krakow's Wailing Wall:
Benches like this one with a sculpture of him sitting on them are also located at Tel Aviv University, the Consulate General of Poland in New York City, and in three other Polish cities. There is an additional statue of him at Georgetown University, and three American and three Polish universities have awarded him honorary doctorates. He is a popular guy.
A nearby plaque also notes that he was named "Righteous Among the Nations," a designation given to those who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. He was also awarded the American Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, twelve years after his death.
A little further down the street, we stopped at the "Old Synagogue," which was built sometime in the 15th century (either 1407 or 1492, they aren't quite sure) and rebuilt in 1570. It is the oldest surviving Jewish structure in the country. Like the other synagogues, it was ransacked by the Germans during World War II and all of its precious artifacts were stolen, and then it was used as a warehouse.
In 1943, 30 Poles were executed in front of its wall. Their names are engraved on three sides of a stone cube standing in the courtyard:
As far as I can tell by using Google Translate, the third side says "At this spot on October 28, 1943, the Nazis shot 30 Poles."
Just behind the Old Synagogue is a mural that honors the memory of several generations of the Bosak family who lived in this home until the Nazis arrived. The most important part of the mural is the woman on the lower right, Irene Sendler, a non-Jew who regularly smuggled medicine and money into the ghetto at risk to her own life. She was also part of an organization that smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto--8 to 10 a month--saving approximately 2,500 children. She was given the "Righteous Among the Nations" designation in 1965, but was not allowed to travel to Israel to receive the award until 1983.
Another mural is painted on the wall of the Galicia Jewish Museum, which held a contest to determine the design. This mural was the winner:
Everything in this post up until this point shows the original Jewish Quarter, but in 1940, as part of a "cleansing" of Krakow to provide "pure" neighborhoods, all the Jews were ordered to leave the city. About 23,000 Jews left voluntarily early in the process, and the rest were herded out of the city boundaries, marked by the Vistula River (below). They were allowed to bring only 25 kg (about 55 pounds) of their belongings.
Our guide led us across the bridge and into a Krakow suburb named Podgorze, the area that became the Ghetto in March 1941. This was one of the five main Jewish Ghettos of the Nazi regime during the German occupation of Poland. It held 16,000 Jews when it was first formed in an area that used to hold 3,500 residents. Apartments were packed with people, each allotted two square meters of space. On average, there were four families per apartment, but in reality, many people lived on the street. Eight months later, the boundaries of the ghetto were reduced at the same time the population increased. A barbed wire and/or brick wall around the ghetto kept everyone inside.
There were forced labor projects inside the ghetto, such as textile factories, and some Jews were allowed to work at nearby factories outside the ghetto, including at Oskar Schindler's factory.
Beginning May 30, 1942, residents of the Ghetto began to be deported to surrounding concentration camps in huge groups--7,000 in the first transport and 4,000 in the second transport. In March 1943, the final "liquidation" of the ghetto occurred. Every source I look at has different numbers, but as far as I can tell, those who were seen as able to work, as many as 7,000 Jews, were sent to the nearby Plaszów Labor Camp, and from there, several thousand were sent to be executed at the Belzec Death Camp, and approximately 3,000 were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of that final group, only 549 were selected for forced labor, and the remainder were murdered in the gas chambers. That left about 2,000 children, elderly, and infirm in the ghetto, and they were all executed in their homes or in the streets of the ghetto within a period of just a few days. I can't even imagine the horror of those days.
Today the evidence of the ghetto has mostly disappeared, and Podgorze is like any other suburb of Krakow. One exception, however, is the large town square (about 3.25 acres) that was once a marketplace known as Plac Zgody (Concord Square), and which is now known as the Jewish Heroes Square. As part of the ghetto, it was a place where residents' possessions were piled up and sorted, where human beings were sorted, where Jews were assembled to be loaded onto convoys taking them to camps, and where many were shot.
Heroes Square is now "decorated" with 33 steel chairs. Usually empty, they represent the discarded furniture and, more broadly, the discarded lives of the Jewish ghetto population. The building at the back of the square, which was once a police office, has the dates of the ghetto floating off the wall: 1941-1943:
Built in 2005, the memorial reminded us a lot of a similar set of empty chairs at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which we visited in January 2015.
Just a few blocks away from this square is the Oskar Schindler factory, which I will cover in my next post.
READING
The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy by Tadeusz Pankiewicz tells the story of the Pankiewicz family, Poles but not Jews, who had a pharmacy in
Krakow when the Nazis set up the ghetto there. Tadeusz, who had inherited the
pharmacy from his father, chose to stay and run the pharmacy from within the
ghetto, making him the only non-Jewish resident during the German occupation.
He provides a first-hand eyewitness account of the atrocities that occurred
there.
Pankiewicz did what he could to alleviate suffering, including dispensing sleeping medications for children to spare them from some of the worst horrors or to keep them quiet during raids and providing hair dye for the elderly to make them appear younger so that they would not be killed or sent to death camps.
I got a little frustrated with the way the book skips around (I think it could use some heavy editing to create a more cohesive whole), but perhaps that is how life in the ghetto was—a bouncing ball that went from hope to despair and back to hope. The penultimate chapter about the final liquidation of the ghetto was especially chilling.
Pankiewicz is another "gentile" who was honored with the "Righteous Among the Nations" designation.
Our next stop was the Jewish Quarter of Krakow, known locally as Kazimierz because it was founded in the 14th century by King Kasimir as a gathering place for Jews. By 1939, the Jewish population of Krakow was 70,000, about 25% of the population. In less than 18 months, the Jewish population was about 15,000, and in March 1941, the Krakow Ghetto was established to house what was left of the Jews. More about that later. By the end of the war, the Jewish population of Krakow had been essentially decimated.
After the war, this neighborhood was largely neglected in rebuilding efforts. It was a poor area with a high crime rate. In 1988 a Jewish Cultural Festival was started, and the neighborhood began to turn around. Then the movie Schindler's List was filmed here in 1993, and the place became a tourist attraction.
Today, the Jewish Quarter is the second-largest tourist attraction in Krakow after Old Town. It's a busy, famous part of the city, but the Jewish population remains quite small.
When we were there, a flea market was drawing a lot of people to the square around what was once the kosher slaughterhouse:
We didn't go inside the Isaac Synagogue, but we did go inside the Remah Synagogue not too far down the street. It was built in 1558 and is locally known as the "New Synagogue" to distinguish it from the "Old Synagogue," which I'll discuss later. During World War II, the interior of this synagogue was also destroyed, and it was subsequently used as a storehouse for firefighting equipment. After the war the Jewish Denominational Council was able to get permission to restore the interior in 1957.
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| Photo from here |
Although small, the interior is really beautiful. I loved the ceiling:
The wrought iron fencing around the bimah (the platform on which the Torah is read) is an exact copy of what was there before the war:
One of the most important Jewish cemeteries in Europe is behind the Remah Synagogue. Many of the graves date back to the 16th century. Of course, during the German occupation of Krakow, Nazis severely damaged the cemetery, even hauling away tombstones and using them as paving stones in the concentration camps or selling them. Imagine the psychological effect of walking on the tombstones of your people while in the camps. The cruelty was beyond belief.
After the war, the cemetery was cleaned of the rubbish that had been thrown there (it was used as a dump) and restored as much as possible. Many gravestones were unearthed, and others were returned to the cemetery from the camps and other places. Although there was no way to know which grave they belonged to, they were at least replaced in an upright position. Of course, what is there now is only a fraction of the thousands that were there prior to the war.
For Jews, the miracle of the Remah Cemetery is that the headstone of a very famous figure in their history, Rabbi Moses Isserles (whose name is abbreviated as "Remah"--and for whom the cemetery is named), was one of the few that survived. Rabbi Moses lived from 1530 to 1572 and was a world-renowned scholar as well as a descendant of King David. Before the war, his grave was a major pilgrimage site for Polish Jews. Today his headstone is behind the synagogue and protected by a wrought iron fence:
Another wall near the entrance of the cemetery is covered with plaques memorializing family members lost in the Holocaust:
Surveying the scene is a statue of Jan Karski (1914-2000), a Polish Catholic resistance fighter whose job was to report details of the Holocaust to outside governments and to provide a link to the Polish underground. It was Karski who told President Franklin Roosevelt about the Holocaust in a meeting in the Oval Office in July 1943 (for all the good it did). After the war, Karski studied at Georgetown University, where he received a PhD in 1952 and where he later taught for 40 years. One of his pupils was Bill Clinton.
A little further down the street, we stopped at the "Old Synagogue," which was built sometime in the 15th century (either 1407 or 1492, they aren't quite sure) and rebuilt in 1570. It is the oldest surviving Jewish structure in the country. Like the other synagogues, it was ransacked by the Germans during World War II and all of its precious artifacts were stolen, and then it was used as a warehouse.
In 1943, 30 Poles were executed in front of its wall. Their names are engraved on three sides of a stone cube standing in the courtyard:
As far as I can tell by using Google Translate, the third side says "At this spot on October 28, 1943, the Nazis shot 30 Poles."
Here is a better photo of the wall, topped by a very Jewish-looking structure. Note the high windows, the thick walls, and the general military look. This was built to be a fortress for the Jews.
Another mural is painted on the wall of the Galicia Jewish Museum, which held a contest to determine the design. This mural was the winner:
There were forced labor projects inside the ghetto, such as textile factories, and some Jews were allowed to work at nearby factories outside the ghetto, including at Oskar Schindler's factory.
Beginning May 30, 1942, residents of the Ghetto began to be deported to surrounding concentration camps in huge groups--7,000 in the first transport and 4,000 in the second transport. In March 1943, the final "liquidation" of the ghetto occurred. Every source I look at has different numbers, but as far as I can tell, those who were seen as able to work, as many as 7,000 Jews, were sent to the nearby Plaszów Labor Camp, and from there, several thousand were sent to be executed at the Belzec Death Camp, and approximately 3,000 were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of that final group, only 549 were selected for forced labor, and the remainder were murdered in the gas chambers. That left about 2,000 children, elderly, and infirm in the ghetto, and they were all executed in their homes or in the streets of the ghetto within a period of just a few days. I can't even imagine the horror of those days.
Today the evidence of the ghetto has mostly disappeared, and Podgorze is like any other suburb of Krakow. One exception, however, is the large town square (about 3.25 acres) that was once a marketplace known as Plac Zgody (Concord Square), and which is now known as the Jewish Heroes Square. As part of the ghetto, it was a place where residents' possessions were piled up and sorted, where human beings were sorted, where Jews were assembled to be loaded onto convoys taking them to camps, and where many were shot.
Heroes Square is now "decorated" with 33 steel chairs. Usually empty, they represent the discarded furniture and, more broadly, the discarded lives of the Jewish ghetto population. The building at the back of the square, which was once a police office, has the dates of the ghetto floating off the wall: 1941-1943:
The chairs are placed around the square in somewhat of a grid and all facing in the same direction:
Slightly larger-than-life, they stand on small, elevated platforms, which give the illusion that they are floating. On the day we were there, almost all of them had a lantern on the seat, and some had other forms of "decoration." There had been some kind of memorial event going on, and the added objects were part of it.
Built in 2005, the memorial reminded us a lot of a similar set of empty chairs at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which we visited in January 2015.
Just a few blocks away from this square is the Oskar Schindler factory, which I will cover in my next post.
READING
The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy by Tadeusz Pankiewicz tells the story of the Pankiewicz family, Poles but not Jews, who had a pharmacy in
Krakow when the Nazis set up the ghetto there. Tadeusz, who had inherited the
pharmacy from his father, chose to stay and run the pharmacy from within the
ghetto, making him the only non-Jewish resident during the German occupation.
He provides a first-hand eyewitness account of the atrocities that occurred
there.Pankiewicz did what he could to alleviate suffering, including dispensing sleeping medications for children to spare them from some of the worst horrors or to keep them quiet during raids and providing hair dye for the elderly to make them appear younger so that they would not be killed or sent to death camps.
I got a little frustrated with the way the book skips around (I think it could use some heavy editing to create a more cohesive whole), but perhaps that is how life in the ghetto was—a bouncing ball that went from hope to despair and back to hope. The penultimate chapter about the final liquidation of the ghetto was especially chilling.
Pankiewicz is another "gentile" who was honored with the "Righteous Among the Nations" designation.
The Jewish history in Poland was really at the top of my list. It was so fascinating and so sad. It brought the holocaust home to me like nothing else has.
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