POLAND, KRAKOW: OSKAR SCHINDLER MUSEUM

June 23, 2019

I have to throw in one picture of a building that is next door to the Oskar Schindler Museum. Any guesses what "MOCAK" stands for? 

MOCAK = Museum Of Contemporary Art Krakow. That was easy, right? It was built in 2011 on a piece of land where part of Oskar Schindler's factory once stood.

The Schindler Museum is actually not a museum about Oskar Schindler and his personally dangerous attempt to save as many Jews as possible. Rather, it is a museum about World War II, including the Holocaust and with a little bit of Schindler. Our guide told us that many people are really disappointed by that fact, but I thought it was one of the best WWII museums I've seen.

I'm pretty sure most people today know who Oskar Schindler was, due largely to the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie Schindler's List. Much of the movie was shot in the Jewish Quarter of Krakow, with some of it filmed in Schindler's factory itself. The factory manufactured enamelware--dishes made of metal covered with a porcelain-like material.

This video juxtaposes scenes from the movie with the modern-day Krakow sites where they were filmed. It's chilling to watch the movie after having been to the actual neighborhood:

These doors into the factory are in the movie:

There is a bit of a disconnect to see the tourists milling about what just 77 years ago was the center of so much darkness. However, I guess this factory was one spot of hope in the city:

One of the few nods to Schindler is this wall of photos on the exterior wall of the museum of Jews who worked in the factory and survived the war:

The tour starts by establishing context--Krakow before the war. There are lots of sepia-toned photos from the 1930s and 1940s:

We recognized Old Town Krakow in this photo from the 1930s:

Walls of scrapbook photos brought the local Jewish population to life:

As we walked down a meandering path, we peered through openings in the walls at scenes from Krakow:

Maps helped to orient us in time and space, such as this one that explains the invasion of Poland by Germany:

This is a TKS Tankette, a small armored vehicle designed in Poland in the 1930s with an innovative turning periscope. Unfortunately, these were no match for the German tanks that were part of the September 1, 1939, invasion of Poland:

Six weeks after the invasion of Poland, Hitler established the General Government in Poland and Krakow was made the seat of that government.

Remember the Battle of Grunwald monument in a previous post? Invading forces destroyed the sculpture, although some locals were able to save a few pieces of it.

In addition, any Polish eagle symbol (Krakow's city emblem) was replaced with a swastika.

The museum has information about the arrest of the university professors two months after the invasion:

This is the statement issued at the time of the arrest: "Ladies and Gentlemen! You have tried to resume work in your research units and organize exams without asking our permission. You have made an attempt to reactive the University without obtaining permission from us. By doing so, you have indeed proved that you have no idea about the real situation in which the University has recently found itself, and which shall continue at least until the end of the war. Your attempts to carry out examinations and to resume the University's normal operation are an act of malice and hostility towards the Third Reich. Beside that, the Jagiellonian University has always been a centre of anti-German propaganda. Consider yourselves arrested. You shall be taken to a POW camp where you shall be properly informed of your real situation. No questions should be asked. I will now ask the ladies to leave. And you [gentlemen] shall be taken away immediately. I think that Mr. Rector will deign to go first." SS Sturmbannfuhrer Bruno Muller


The beautiful Wawel Castle we had seen earlier in the day was occupied by this man and his German contingent:

"Rynek Glowny," or the Main Market, was renamed Adolf Hitler Square:

Wouldn't it be interesting to know more about these people?

Here is a horrifying quote from Hans Frank, the man in the news article above who was Governor-General of Poland:

The goods in this picture are part of the plunder of Jewish property in the ghetto:

An actual sample of the hand-stitched armbands worn by all Jews:

Dr. Julian Aleksandrowicz, a Polish medical doctor imprisoned in the Krakow Ghetto who founded a ghetto hospital, wrote: "In the April of 1941, when the Jews celebrated Passover, a holiday established to commemorate the Exodus from Egypt, the bricklayers began to build a wall around the ghetto. The torturers shaped the wall like tombstones . . . . They used the symbol in advance, thus rendering into a mass grave that piece of land inhabited by a dozen or so thousand discriminated human beings."

Film-maker Roman Polanski (The Pianist,Chinatown, etc.) was eight years old when he became a resident of the Krakow Ghetto. His mother was shipped off to Auschwitz and killed there, and his father was sent to Mauthausen Concentration Camp. Father and son were reunited after the war and moved back to Krakow. Polanski moved to the US in 1968 age 35. A scrap of paper signed by young Roman Polanski reads, "I suddenly realized that we were to be walled in. I got so scared that I eventually burst into tears."

This chart shows the ghetto population by sex and age groups. Of the 17,163 residents at the time, 55% were female and 18% were children:

At two square meters per person and/or ten people in an apartment, there was a lot of "togetherness":

One room in the museum reproduces Oskar Schindler's office. The desk is a copy, but they have the actual log books and the map from his wall:

In the adjoining room, names of people saved by Schindler--about 1,100, are written on the wall:

Moving on, we came across information about the 1940 massacre of as many as 22,000 Polish POW officers and citizens by the Soviet army in the Katyn forest in the USSR:

Of course, there is a display featuring Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II. Before he became Pope in 1978, however, he was appointed Bishop of Krakow in 1958, Archbishop of Krakow in 1963, and Cardinal in 1967. Why is he in this museum? He was part of the underground resistance at Krakow University during World War II, and he was the first pope to visit a synagogue in 1986.

There are displays focused on the Plaszow camp, where many of the Krakow Ghetto residents were ultimately sent.

A timeline of the camp:

This gruesome poster says, "Jews with typhus lice." Typhus was a huge problem in the ghettos and camps:

On our way out, we saw examples of store fronts during the German occupation:

These children's toys seems incredibly out of place, but the Hitler and skeleton marionettes fit right in:

At the very end of the journey through the museum there is this wall that looks a little like a Torah scroll. I can't remember what all the writing is--journal quotes? book excerpts? I'm not sure. There is writing in English, German, Hebrew, Polish, and probably a few other languages I can't identify:

And there is Oskar Schindler, who looks more like Thomas S. Monson than he looks like Liam Neesom (who plays him in the movie):

More photos of those who lived because of Schindler,

Schindler died in 1974 in Germany and is buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the only member of the Nazi Party to be so honored. He and his wife were named Righteous Among Nations by the Israeli government in 1993, the year the movie was released.

BOOKS AND MOVIES

Schindler's List (1993) is an obvious movie to watch if you are going to Krakow. Filmed in black and white, it is graphic and violent. It's not for children nor the faint of heart. I'm not a regular R-rated movie watcher, but I would recommend this for anyone interested in the Holocaust. I think there are PG-13 versions available.

Producer/Director Steven Spielberg wanted to be as factual as possible, trying to create something that is almost a documentary. The score is one of John Williams's masterpieces, and the haunting main theme is a violin piece played by Itzak Perlman. The movie was an instant success and won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture and Best Director.


Before there was the movie Schindler’s List, released in 1993, there was the book Schindler’s Ark, written by Thomas Keneally in 1982 and winner of the 1982 Booker Prize, the British equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

I was surprised by the Booker Award, which is usually given to a novel, and I don’t consider this book a novel. However, it is listed in the Booker list as a “biographical novel,” somewhere between a biography and a novel, perhaps because Keneally speculates about some conversations, events, etc.  It is clear that the author did extensive research, which included interviewing many of those fortunate Jews who found themselves in Oskar Schindler’s care. 

I was surprised by how closely the movie follows the book, although Oskar is perhaps even MORE flawed in Keneally’s version than in Spielberg’s. I was afraid I would be disappointed by the book because the movie is so powerful, but that was definitely not the case.  Read this book, even if you’ve seen the movie. It’s an even deeper, more nuanced view of an unlikely hero.


Katyn, nominated for the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, is a Polish movie with English subtitles. It is available to watch in its entirety (1 hour 46 minutes) on YouTube.

The movie tells the horrific story of the massacre of 22,000 Polish military officers and members of the intelligentsia in 1939 in the Katyn forest in the USSR.

Part of the movie is set in Krakow, and the closing of the Krakow University and the deportation of all its professors to concentration camps is also covered.

It too is a pretty graphic, violent movie, but how could a depiction of these events be otherwise?