Kraków: The Untouched City and the Ghetto That Vanished

You are facing the Barbican, a round brick fortress with seven turrets. It dates from 1498. It guarded the entrance to Poland's royal city. Look around. The walls, St Florian's Gate, the church towers. Everything is standing. Kraków is one of the few large cities of Central Europe that came out of the Second World War almost intact. Warsaw was razed. Kraków was not. The Germans chose it as the capital of their occupation government and lived in it for five years. In January 1945, the Red Army advanced so fast that the Germans withdrew almost without a fight. It is said they had explosive ch…

You are facing St Mary's Basilica, with its two towers of different heights. If you arrive on the hour, listen: from the taller tower, a trumpeter plays a melody that breaks off abruptly. Legend says that in the thirteenth century a watchman was sounding the alarm when a Tatar arrow pierced his throat. Ever since, the tune has stopped at the same point. Inside the church is the largest Gothic wooden altarpiece in Europe. The sculptor Veit Stoss carved it at the end of the fifteenth century. Its figures are life-size, gilded and painted. In 1939, Kraków's priests dismantled it and hid it in …

You are on the Rynek Główny, the Main Market Square. It is one of the largest medieval squares in Europe. In the middle stands the long Cloth Hall. Nearby, the statue of the poet Adam Mickiewicz. In October 1939, Kraków became the capital of the General Government, the Polish territory occupied and run directly by Germany. The new masters renamed this square. For five years it was called Adolf-Hitler-Platz. Streets changed names, signs were written in German. In 1940 they tore down the statue of Mickiewicz, Poland's great national poet. The one you see is a postwar reconstruction. Some tra…

You are facing the Collegium Novum, the neo-Gothic brick building of the Jagiellonian University. It is one of the oldest universities in Europe. Copernicus studied here. On 6 November 1939, an SS officer summoned the university's professors to a lecture in this building. The subject was German policy on science and education. More than a hundred and eighty professors came. When they were all seated in the hall, the officer announced that the university was closed. They were all arrested. They were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. Some of the oldest died there, of co…

You are on Wawel Hill, facing the royal castle and the cathedral. For centuries, the kings of Poland were crowned and buried here. It is the symbolic heart of the country. In 1939, the Germans chose this castle as the residence of the man who would govern occupied Poland: Hans Frank, a Nazi Party lawyer. Frank lived here like a monarch. With his family, with servants, with stolen artworks on the walls. He held concerts and gala dinners. From these rooms he signed the orders of a regime of terror. Forced labor, mass executions of hostages, planned starvation, the creation of ghettos. He kep…

You are on Szeroka Street, in Kazimierz. It is more an elongated square than a street. At the far end stands the Old Synagogue, from the fifteenth century, the oldest surviving one in Poland. Kazimierz was a separate town, founded in the fourteenth century by King Casimir the Great. Jews settled here at the end of the fifteenth century, when they were expelled from central Kraków. For four centuries this was one of the great centers of Jewish life in Europe. Synagogues, Talmudic schools, printing presses, markets. In 1939, some sixty thousand Jews lived in Kraków. One in four of the city's …

You are at the Remuh Synagogue and its old sixteenth-century cemetery. Go into the cemetery and look for the wall by the entrance. It is no ordinary wall. It is made of fragments of broken tombstones, set like a mosaic. Hebrew letters cut in half, carved flowers, priestly hands. During the occupation, the Germans wrecked this cemetery. They used the headstones as building material and as paving. After the war, the few survivors gathered up the pieces. With those they could not return to their graves, they built this wall. It is called Kraków's Wailing Wall. The cemetery holds the grave of …

You are on Ghetto Heroes Square, in Podgórze. Look at the bronze chairs scattered across the square, all facing different ways. There are seventy, counting those that continue to the tram stop. In March 1941, the Germans set up the Kraków ghetto here. They shut some fifteen thousand Jews into a district where three thousand had lived before. Several families to an apartment. They surrounded it with a wall. For the top they chose a rounded arch shape. It looked like the headstones of a Jewish cemetery. No one believes it was a coincidence. This square was the center of the ghetto. The deport…

You are facing the Pharmacy Under the Eagle. Today it is a small museum. In 1941 it was an ordinary pharmacy that ended up inside the ghetto. Its owner was Tadeusz Pankiewicz. He was Polish and Catholic. The Germans offered to move his business outside the ghetto. He refused. He was the only non-Jew allowed to live and work inside. For two years the pharmacy was much more than a place to buy medicine. Pankiewicz and his three assistants handed out medicine for free. They smuggled messages and food. They hid people during raids. They gave hair dye to older people so they would look younger a…

You are on Lwowska Street, facing a fragment of the original ghetto wall. Look at the top: a row of rounded arches, like headstones side by side. The ghetto's inhabitants noticed at once. They lived shut in behind a cemetery. There is a plaque in Hebrew and Polish. It says, roughly: here they lived, suffered and died at the hands of the German executioners. From here they left on their last journey to the death camps. Inside, life went on as best it could. There were secret schools, soup kitchens, a hospital, even a theater. People married, had children, worked in workshops for the Germans …

You are outside Oskar Schindler's Factory, at Lipowa 4. Look at the gate and the brick front with its old sign. Today it is a museum about the occupation of Kraków. Oskar Schindler was a Sudeten German, a Nazi Party member, a womanizer, a drinker and an opportunist. He came to Kraków in 1939 to make money from the war. He took over a factory making enamel pots and kitchenware. He hired Jewish workers from the ghetto because they were cheap labor. He made a lot of money. Something changed in him. We do not know exactly what. Perhaps watching the liquidation of the ghetto from a hill. Perhaps…

You are where the Płaszów camp once stood. Today it is a wide expanse of grass and hills. Look at the huge stone monument: human figures with their chests torn open. There is almost nothing here to see. That is the hardest part. The Germans dismantled the camp before leaving and burned the bodies to erase the evidence. Płaszów was first a forced labor camp and then a concentration camp. It was built on top of two Jewish cemeteries. The headstones were used to pave the roads. Its commandant, Amon Göth, was notorious for his cruelty. He shot prisoners from the balcony of his villa, near here.…