Kazimierz and other Jewish sites in Krakow

We drove west to Krakow on an early Sunday morning and arrived in time for lunch.  Our bus drove to the Kazimierz district, also known as the Jewish Quarter. 

The front wall of the Old Synagogue in Kazimierz, Krakow.

We made plans to begin our tour after lunch.  The women of our group decided to eat at one of the Jewish Quarter restaurants, and had a delicious meal of fresh salads.

The "In your pocket" site claims, "no other place in Europe conveys a sense of pre-war Jewish culture on the continent better than Kazimierz."  The effects of the war and the communist regime had left the quarter in bad shape,  but in the last two decades the quarter has become a vibrant hot spot for music and nightlife.  I've just finished a novel by Peter Matthiesen called In Paradise which includes the observation that non-Jewish performers play Klezmer music in Kazimierz.  He implies that the entire quarter is run by non-Jews.  We had a similar impression of a Jewish restaurant called Mandragora in Lublin.  We had delicious food (pierogies, potato pancakes, cholent), but we discovered that the proprietors are not actually Jewish or Israeli.

Our purpose in visiting Kazimierz was to explore the Jewish environment. Following lunch, we headed to the small Remu'h Synagogue built in the 16th century.  The synagogue and cemetery are named (by way of acronym) for its founder, Rabbi Moses Isserles.  Isserles is said to have established the synagogue in honor of his deceased wife, Malka.  The little Orthodox synagogue is one of two synagogues still in operation in Krakow.

This facility is undergoing repairs, but there are some clear spots which show off the shul's features.

The cemetery attached to the synagogue is also from the mid-16th century.  As had occurred in Majdanek, Wikipedia reports that "the Nazis destroyed the cemetery tearing down the walls and hauling away tombstones to be used as paving stones in the camps, or selling them for profit."  It managed to survive the war because the headstones "unearthed as paving stones have been returned and re-erected, although they represent a small fraction of the monuments that once stood in the cemetery."

This cemetery has its own "wailing wall" made of gravestones which Nazi soldiers had desecrated.

We saw another one of these walls at the large Krakow Jewish cemetery.  As we left the cemetery we saw this plaque.

As we walked down the street, our guide told us that Helena Rubinstein had grown up in Kazimierz.

Walking further through the neighborhood, we saw a hotel with this sign beside the door (most hotels don't feature the Jewish ritual baths, or mikvehs).

Our next point of interest was the Izaak Synagogue, the second still-operational Orthodox shul in Kazimierz.

Although I did not find confirmation of this point, I believe our guide told us that this facility is now operated by the Chabad movement.  Our guide also shared a "there's no place like home" legend of the Izaak Synagogue.

We walked through a site well known to those who have seen Schindler's List (more SL references in a bit).

The weather became progressively hotter during our time in Poland.  By the time we were on this walk through Kazimierz, it was very warm indeed.  We decided to take a quick stop inside the cool, dark interior of the Corpus Christi Basilica (construction began in the 14th century and ended in the 16th).  It was a pleasant reprieve from the heat and we enjoyed the beautiful religious art.

After our cool-down, we walked through the market square and saw the 15th century Kazimierz Town Hall which houses an ethnographic museum, but there wasn't any time to visit it.

We next stopped at the Memorial to Jews located at the deportation site; each chair is meant to represent 1000 victims.

This square is  called Plac Zgody.  A plaque across the square says  it was  "the site of mass murders of Krakow Jews in the years 1941-1943; it was from here that the Jews were transported to concentration camps.  From the first days of the Nazi occupation, German authorities continued to restrict the rights of  Jews, commanding them in 1940 to leave the city of Krakow within 3 months.  The 17,000 of those who remained were forced into the ghetto formed in March 1941 in a part of the District of Podgorze.  From 1st to 8th June and on 28 October 1942, mass displacement of the inhabitants of the ghetto to the death camp in Belzec continued, and the area of the ghetto was reduced and divided into two sections.  Those in employment lived in section 'A', while section 'B' was inhabited by the unemployed  On 13th March, 1943, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto; inhabitants of the section 'A' were marched to the labour camp in Palszow, and people living in the section 'B', mostly women, children, the elderly, and the ill, were murdered or transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp."  

Parc Zgody was also the site of the so-called Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy.  Pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz was the last remaining non Jew  to run a business in the ghetto.  Named a righteous gentile among the nations, he was credited with helping Jews escape from Krakow during the war.

Our next stop was the camp featured in Schindler's List, Plaszow.  I was shocked by how close it was--right in the city proper.

We drove by the Amon Goeth house and were admonished by our guide that the policy was not to take photos, but she gave us a kind of verbal wink saying if we were going to take a photo we should be quick about it.  My photo turned out very poorly--just as well.  Who needs to commemorate the evil-doers?

More important to our purpose was the large monument on the other side of the camp.

Our guide referred to this as the monument of the brokenhearted, due to the fact that there's a large gap where the heart should be.  I think it's a powerful monument.

I was trying to get a good angle, not looking where my feet were  when I tripped and fell on my knee.  It was painful and embarrassing, but most importantly to me--my camera wasn't working properly after I got myself into a standing position.  I had broken a camera last fall when I was visiting Germany, and I was fearful I'd done it again.  I truly didn't want to have to buy another one.  Regardless, the camera wasn't working properly for a couple of days. 

The day we visited, a Sunday, Plaszow looked like a holiday park.  We saw families having picnics, wandering about the grounds with strollers, bikes, and other wheeled vehicles.  It really is disconcerting to see casual holiday-makers using these grounds in this way.

Following this visit, we ended up at Schindler's Factory, now a museum recounting the Nazi occupation of Krakow.  I had visited this museum the previous year with my friend Cindy.  My impression then was that the museum told the story of the Nazi occupation from a distinctly Polish perspective.  We had to wait for our guide, an enthusiastic young man who spoke very rapidly.  This tour (I can't remember if it was at 5 or 5:30) was the last thing we had on our agenda.  I'll speak for myself here, but I wasn't really "plugged in".  The fact that I had already gone through the museum probably contributed to my lack of focus.  I told one of my friends that I was only picking up about one of every five words our museum guide uttered, which meant I missed some of the guide's comments.  At one point the guide said that maybe 30% of the Poles didn't like the Jews, but NOBODY wanted them dead.  The problem is that this statement isn't accurate.  Anti-semitism was rampant throughout Europe, and was very marked in regions around Poland (see Jan T. Gross's Neighbors and Edward Reicher's Country of Ash).  He ended his presentation with a reference to the blood libel, saying only very stupid people believed it.  It was a very strange thing to say, and a very strange way to end the tour.

Actually, the day ended in an even more strange way.  Our hotel rooms were very, very cramped.  It wasn't a problem for me since my assigned roommate had never shown up leaving me alone in the room.  Almost everyone else shared a room, and it didn't make for a happy situation.  People had no room to place their suitcases.  Traveling all those hours, walking around all day in the heat, listening to erroneous commentary at the museum, and then settling in to close quarters did not make for a good combination.  There was also the issue of the other visitors on our floor--Irish footballers who had been drinking for three days straight.  While I did not observe this myself, other people in my group were greeted by naked young men who were getting sick in the hotel corridor.   Oy.