Kazimierz, an area of Kraków wedged between the Old Town and the Vistula River to the south, is where I stayed during my week (11-18 July 2018) in Kraków. Kazimierz is known for its great restaurants and nightlife. It was also the home of Kraków’s very large Jewish community up until World War II. After my sobering visit to Auschwitz on 15 July, I made a point of visiting some significant Jewish sites here and in Podgórze, a residential district across the river from Kazimierz, the following day, for some more uplifting stories from the Holocaust period.
Podgórze is an unexciting suburban-feeling neighborhood for the most part.
Modern apartments, a secondary train station, and a lot of construction (16 July 2018).
But during the World War II German occupation of Kraków, it was where the Nazis created the city’s Jewish ghetto. Even before that time, Podgórze was run-down, and many of the buildings Kraków’s Jewish citizens were forced to move into were unfit for human habitation. As such, very few of the structures from that time are still standing. But a couple of good museums in Podgórze commemorate the Nazi period, and both manage to tell stories from this period of history that tend to affirm one’s faith in humanity.
One is the Pharmacy Under the Eagle. The pharmacy building survived the war and intervening years and has been restored to its 1940s appearance inside and out. The owner of the pharmacy, Polish non-Jew Tadeusz Pankiewicz, and his female employees, at great risk to themselves, helped the Jews of the adjacent ghetto by squirreling away sacred Torah scrolls from synagogues before the Nazis could burn them, providing medicine to the inhabitants of the ghetto, giving Jewish mothers sedatives for their babies so they wouldn’t cry during the family’s attempt to escape from the ghetto, and so on.
The unassuming exterior of the pharmacy (16 July 2018).
Now you can see why it’s called the “Pharmacy Under the Eagle.” The eagle is a symbol of the Polish nation, something that in this case the Nazis apparently let slide. The museum here consists of five or so rooms of the pharmacy. Visitors can open pretty much any drawer or closet in any of the rooms. Most of these contain stories and photos about the pharmacy and about life in the ghetto (16 July 2018).
The big tourist draw in Podgórze is Oskar Schindler’s former factory, made famous by Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie Schindler’s List. Schindler’s enamelware factory, which also produced (mostly defective) war-related items for Germany, was located in Podgórze near the Jewish ghetto, which supplied much of the factory’s labor force.
Understandably, Schindler’s Factory is a big tourist draw. Particularly on a Monday, when I went (on Mondays, it’s free admission). I got in line in the early afternoon and was among the last eight or so people to get tickets (16 July 2018).
The museum was not at all what I expected. I thought I’d see a reconstruction of the factory as it looked in the 1940s, and displays telling Schindler’s story. But actually very little of the museum features the factory itself, or discusses what Schindler did.
Oskar Schindler’s office is, I think, the only room of the factory that has been restored to its World War II appearance (16 July 2018).
And there is a memorial listing the names of all of the people Schindler saved (16 July 2018).
But what Schindler’s Factory mainly does is provide a very detailed local history of the Nazi occupation period (1939-1945) in Kraków. The whole experience was especially vivid for me because I visited after five days in Kraków, and when a museum display discussed a particular incident in a certain street, more often than not I could say to myself, “I know where that street is. That’s where I ate dinner Saturday night” or whatever.
There are old photographs in there showing swastika flags flying over Wawel Hill. The Germans renamed Rynek Glowny “Adolf-Hitler-Platz” in 1940. It’s a recurring aspect of the Polish historical experience that’s very hard for me, as an American, to comprehend. After all, the U.S. hasn’t fought an invader on its own soil for over 200 years! Can you imagine what it would be like if a rival power conquered the U.S.? If the Washington Monument was ringed by, say, Chinese communist flags? Or if Times Square were renamed “Putin Plaza”? That’s what happened to the Poles, and there are still people around today who lived through those events. It’s wild.
I just found all of the detail very intriguing. There were Jews the Nazis recruited to act as policemen and enforcers in the ghetto, for example. Some of them risked their lives by double-crossing the Nazis and helping their fellow Jews. But others, as they say, tried to be more Catholic than the Pope, and brutalized and terrorized the ghetto. There are photos and stories of many of these people in the museum. I didn’t know about any of this. It’s fascinating.
The Germans stole heaps of valuables from the Jews when they forced them to move into the ghetto (16 July 2018).
This is the outfit of a guard at the Płaszów concentration camp, which was also located in Podgórze just a short walk from the Jewish ghetto. Look at the skull on the hatband. It’s as if the Nazis were saying, “Yeah, we’re evil. We’re the bad guys. And we revel in it.” This was an age when totalitarian regimes vied rather effectively with democracies for legitimacy, and one in which countries like Germany and the USSR felt entitled to designate spheres of influence and annex neighboring countries without a thought for what the inhabitants of those countries wanted. I hope that phase of human history is dead and buried (16 July 2018).
However, I hasten to point out that places like Podgórze and Kazimierz aren’t just museums dedicated to all the awful (and occasionally nice) things that happened to Kraków’s Jews during the War. Kazimierz in particular is a lively, hip, and rapidly gentrifying part of the city. It’s kind of Kraków’s much more affordable equivalent of 14th Street Northwest in Washington, D.C.
There are construction sites aplenty in all big cities, but Kazimierz is particularly chock-full of them. Tread carefully (12 July 2018).
Horse-drawn carriages are arguably the tourist conveyance of choice in the Old Town. But here in Kazimierz, golf carts crammed with tourists rule the roads. Most have plastic sheeting along the sides, which I’m sure attracted extra riders during the frequent rains (12 July 2018).
Unlike the Old Town, Kazimierz does mix a few modern buildings in with the older structures. Notice yet another golf cart (11 July 2018).
I love the creeping dragon on the façade of this building (16 July 2018).
The lower storeys of these buildings house restaurants, bars, and secondhand clothing stores mostly. And did I mention it rained a lot while I was here? (11 July 2018).
This squat, unappealing building sits in the middle of Plac Nowy in the heart of Kazimierz. It’s not much to look at. But per my visit to Schindler’s Factory museum, before the Nazis deported all of Kraków’s Jews to the ghetto across the river, there were a number of Jewish businesses here. A Jewish dentist working here risked his life to pull the tooth of a desperate non-Jewish Pole, who had to go through about three layers of intermediaries to even talk to a Jew at the time. Similar measures were required for Poles who wanted to buy meat from the kosher butchers here. So I left with a healthy respect for this shack and the grungy square around it (11 July 2018).
These days, all of the vendors in the 10-12 storefronts in the building sell snacks. About eight of those sell only zapiekanki, or “Polish pizza,” and they all seem to be thriving. Another reason for respect (13 July 2018).
Plac Nowy is also the unlikely hub of Kazimierz’ nightlife. The few blocks on all side of it are filled with food trucks, craft beer gastro-pubs, hookah bars, tattoo parlors, and other hipster haunts (13 July 2018).
Aside from all the eating and drinking I did here, I noted with some satisfaction that, unlike virtually everywhere else I’ve visited that the Nazis got their hands on, there is a kernel of Jewish culture still alive in Kazimierz.
That’s an older but well-maintained synagogue on the left, and a modern Jewish community center building on the right (12 July 2018).
And I would be remiss if I did not point out that historically, the Jewish enclave was in the eastern half of Kazimierz. The Western half was super-Catholic, as is the Polish way.
Although my hotel was in a historically Jewish part of Kazimierz, the huge Corpus Christi Basilica is just a couple of blocks away (12 July 2018).
Another urban monastery! The Church on the Rock sits inside a sprawling monastic complex in Kazimierz. Naturally, there’s a monument to St. John Paul II on the grounds (13 July 2018).