POLAND: JEWISH WARSAW

June 27-28, 2019

The story of Warsaw's Jewish population is perhaps one of the saddest and most reason-defying stories of the Holocaust.  Before World War II there were over 400 synagogues in the city. Only one of those synagogues survived.  At the beginning of 1939, there were about 400,000 Jews living in Warsaw, and less than 10%, or about 35,000, of them survived. Of the survivors, many barely made it out of concentration camps like Auschwitz. 

The round-up of Warsaw's Jews began in November 1940 when several hundred thousand (or 30% of the city's population) were forced into a 1.3-square-mile area that became known as the Warsaw Ghetto. As you can imagine, conditions were terrible. An average of 9.2 persons were crowded into a single room. 

The ghetto was demolished by the Nazis after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of May 1943 (not to be confused with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944). Today, some of the area that used to be the ghetto has been replaced by the business district, and the wonderful Polish spirit of resilience is evident even there.

The curvy skyscraper on the left was designed by Daniel Libeskind (b. 1946), a Jewish Polish-American architect whose parents were both Holocaust survivors. He also designed the Ground Zero Tower in New York City and the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Our guide Pawel sees this 52-story mixed-use building as a symbol of a new, strong Warsaw rising from the ashes of the ghetto.

It is so much easier to talk about this skyscraper than to go back to the 1940s and the physical, moral, and emotional detritus of those days of horror. These Holocaust posts take the most psychological effort for me to write of any that I have done.

So here we go.

There are bits of the Jewish Ghetto scattered around a small area in Warsaw, and this is one reason we were grateful for Pawel's encyclopedic knowledge of the history of his city.

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.

POLAND, KRAKOW: JEWISH QUARTER

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: