These impressions of a historical place follow from a week—deeply moving—when I housed in the Jewish district of Kraków, the city which is Poland’s greatest art treasure.
I wanted to understand whatever could be taken in, over so few days, and to garner something of the vibrancy, repression, and recovery of the Jewish experience there. So, I lodged in Miodowa Street, in a hotel shouldering up against graveyards and synagogues, and started walking, and watching, and reading.
Miodowa stretches at length through the Kazimierz district, which lies just north of the Vistula River that bisects the larger city. Historically, it was home to Kraków Jews, who have lived there for a thousand years. Others of that background live just over the river to the south, in a city district called Podgorski. Both “halves” of the community are now lovely zones of traditional buildings, gardens, and spots perfect for photography or leisurely dining. Most edifices were saved during the war; Kraków was never area-bombed as was Warsaw. Nonetheless, this southern district will always hold latent sadness, for it became the location of a massive labor camp in the era of Nazi occupation after 1939. Jews were brought here, put into 75 or 80 barracks and buildings, worked here, were enslaved here. Thousands of the inmates also died here, or close by.
In the Second World War, Poland was lost in the west to the Wehrmacht. Some of the Polish Army remnants who survived those first weeks moved eastward, out of reach…they thought. Then the Soviets immediately swept up the nation’s other half, in the east.[1] Neither totalitarianism could accept Jewry: Nazi NSDAP ideology was bent on genocide; Soviet Bolshevism was atheistic, and ice-cold to any it conquered. This ill-named “Non-Aggression Pact” of 1939 was less than a marriage in heaven of Right and Left, but the brief union of the two great powers did produce hell for millions, Christian and Jewish, including the people of Kraków.
Kraków came under Berlin’s rule via a regional German governor-generalship. The new tyrants slowly and systematically reduced Jewish liberties, closed out the professions to Jewish talent, took the less specialized jobs away, and punished or jailed these new subjects at whim or will. Open deportations, on-site shootings, mass hangings: these followed all too soon. The town’s ancient synagogue, 15th century and beautiful in red brick and double-nave architecture, was stripped, raped, and reused as a German warehouse. Displays inside record such history.
Today, this ancient synagogue at the end of Jozefa Street is respected and protected. The interior keeps a feel that is grand, if stony gray. It is lit well, artificially, not so much by its small windows. Custodians warm the place with their goodwill and work. The card shop flourishes. Respectful tour groups flow through the temple slowly and quietly. Decor is minimal. There were long vertical doors of the Holy Ark on the east wall (with the building directed to the east and Jerusalem, as surely as are Christian churches in Poland). This inner portal and summons to prayer long ago lost its original doors to theft or repurposing, so that we see only a color photographic impression of some other Holy Ark doors, a copy from elsewhere in Europe.
Nearby, also in the Jewish district of Kazimierz, is a newer, mid-19th century synagogue, on Miodowa Street. This is a successor building of grand form in a line of what numbered well over a hundred such places in the old Kraków. The word “synagogue” means a gathering place, and those could be as inauspicious as a private home which received worshipers periodically. The big building of the 1860s was by reform-minded Jews. Its eclectic style suggests the Moorish, and also the neo-Renaissance, as with its high façade in soft color. Upper galleries, overlooking the central floor, provide separate spaces where women would worship—that separation being as traditional in Judaism as in the Moslem temples.
Unlike the ancient synagogue, here the interiors are heavily and warmly painted, with gilt designs and deep colors, covering lintels, other members, and certain walls. A swath of red velvet signals the place of the Holy Ark doors in the east. Wooden prayer benches are lightly stained; the polish shines on their top tilted surfaces, which are subtly lipped to keep holy books in place. Long windows, numbered in pairs, run the nave aisle, and summer light pours in.
The good feelings of the place come under challenge by the large formal placards displayed along several walls, telling of trauma in the last war. The community as it had been. The tightening, then asphyxiating, legal changes. The gradual pushing and shoving of this distinctive and healthy population in Krakow into jammed space south of the river. The walls that hemmed them in, cruelly designed with rounded tops to make each section look like a gravestone. Ghettoized on street lines set by the foreigners and then secured by their Gestapo.
The Nazi regime is rightly infamous not just for overt brutishness but for sadistic pseudo-logic, and a species of that genre may be studied here. The new authorities thought and spoke as follows: (1) beginning by condemning as “subhumans” a dignified and often prosperous society; (2) forcing their exodus from good homes into jammed, broken, overcrowded buildings where food, water, coal, electricity, and medicine could be desperately short; (3) photographing the shocking result, and alleging that disease and squalor ‘proved’ the Jews were not just subhuman but also a source of epidemics; and (4) packing in more Jews from around Poland while periodically exporting hundreds to death camps as a “way of dealing with camp overcrowding and poor sanitation.” This line of lies, this sickening planning process, devastatingly executed, is documented.[2]
One account is that of a pharmacist allowed to practice in the ghetto. Perhaps the only non-Jewish Pole to live through multiple war years inside Kraków’s Jewish ghetto, Tadeusz Pankiewicz saw everything, hour by hour, including the beatings and the screaming and the Germans’ perverse psychological gamesmanship, whipsawing hopes and fears of all the trapped. His book of 1947[3] names his most common prescriptions at the pharmacy: Sedatives, for babies in hiding; and tranquilizers, for the adults meeting the anxieties, sleeplessness, and despair of human beings living in terror and without control of their lives.
The era’s moral quandaries were many. What should one think of the Jewish Council—which Germans compelled into existence and forced to administer many daily matters among the Jewish population? It appears that initially, most Jews understood these pressures and did not overly blame their compatriots who took the administrative roles; later, the Jewish subjects became much more negative about these co-religionists’ work. Should one fight the occupation physically, or would that just lead to worse repression? In Kraków, not many fought physically; in Warsaw, where guerrilla war was more possible, thousands gave their lives to fighting the occupiers, especially in 1943 and 1944.[4] And what of the Poles—themselves terrorized and subjugated; what duty had they towards their Jewish countrymen? Some three millions of non-Jewish Poles were murdered by the Soviets and the Germans during the war.
Many of the Jews sweating the hours under whip and dog control had an irony to face: their enforced work was constructing the Płaszów camp, south of the Vistula and near the ghetto; when they finished, they were certain to be interned and enslaved there themselves. When the ghetto was “liquidated” in March 1943, it was to this new Płaszów gray labor camp that hundreds of the still-able-bodied were moved. Not until some 20 months later, when the Red Army finally moved in from the east, was the labor complex emptied out. Survivors were marshalled and directed down the road towards a little-known place called Oswiecim, which in German is “Auschwitz.” One place in the ghetto, then called Zgody Square, now remembers the periodic deportations to death camps by a spare art installation: rows of chairs, metal and empty, affixed to the pavement. The image, for me, echoes a sad short phrase by Winston Churchill when he assessed the losses of men in the First World War: “Every cottage had its empty chair.”
It isn’t easy for the tourist or amateur historian to surface from study of these displays showing in the synagogues. One is a little stunned to exit into calm, pretty surroundings. At dusk, there are busy patio restaurants, with strings of little “be lites,” and cheery folks drinking in the warm summer airs—and whatever alcohol they favor. Yet there are horrors running between the paving stones.
The Jewish bookstores are lovely places, physically and morally. Serious customers, and the casual or curious, change places politely, working by one another, in the quiet aisles. But what are we looking at? Much of what is on the shelves opens to pages that freeze the reader. “You thought you’d read it all,” and then there’s a new paragraph, or photo, that stops you cold, and you may stare, as if stone.
For a contrast more subtle, there is the scene outside the new synagogue, 27 Miodowa Street. Unlike the tour groups at the ancient temple nearby, who linger quietly and may seem grave, here it is the tourist mini-train, and transience. Half a dozen people, some looking bored, are brought by the façade—but never for more than 90 seconds, and not for going inside. The guide dishes out a few bland remarks; the little tram moves along, perhaps to the next ice cream shop. It’s one of many spots in Kraków where the vacationers predominate.
A valuable place where we tourists all go is to Oskar Schindler’s “Fabryka” for enamelware and munitions for the German armed forces. No. 4 Lipowa Street is near the wartime ghetto, in the southern city. Among the war stories with moral ambiguities, few surpass the truthful legend of “Schindler’s List,” an admirable film made in Kraków. The principal was an agent of German intelligence with a heart for people and an eye for profit and luxury. He worked the “gray zone” of business, and by running his, with Jewish labor, he protected hundreds of men and women (and their chance to become parents) from the regime’s horrors—both arbitrary and systematic. The crew produced highly usable cookware and sometimes deliberately unworkable munitions. Oskar Schindler winked, kept it all going, and tippled with Reich administrators.
One sees the original building façade, though the factory behind it has been rebuilt or remade several times. One may visit Schindler’s office, where he often met with officials and inspectors to keep them away from his workmen, and there are dozens of tasteful educational displays. Nothing is more powerful than the museum’s introductory film, documenting what witnesses and workers said later about their working days there. Power can come in understatement; sitting there in the air-conditioned darkness of 2026, one listens to calm first-person accounts. Some speak of the luxury of scheduled meals when so many were starving. How strange to consider, at our distance, the luxury a refugee might take in long shift work where pay could be counted upon and one felt shielded from the madness beyond the doorway. This is a heroic story, and a complex one, and a notable case in which a Hollywood movie has actually spurred the learning of tens of thousands of viewers who come to see and to think. Guided tour bookings close in advance at Schindler’s.
We need these true stories today. Europe and the U.S. are twisting in rising tallies of incidents of anti-Semitism. It helps to know a civil suit has crushed the credibility of leading Holocaust denier David Irving, leaving him bankrupt. But studies in history have been dropped out of many core college curricula, and ignorance of the years 1933-1945 grows with time. It is an error to assert that “Hindsight is always 20/20” because tragedies become debate topics, and it can be hard to be sure what was real. My father was on scene when a U.S. Third Army colonel helped save the town of Weimar, Germany via negotiations, but Private Charles R. Harmon did not see or know of Buchenwald, operating close by in its seventh year. As a historian much later, he was bedeviled knowing another Army vet—unnamed here, and no historian—who gave public talks about personally helping open the wire at Buchenwald—when by official records that fellow’s unit was nowhere near that death camp in April 1945. So, I needed my week in Kraków, and the literature I collected there, to peer into local history, and to begin to trim away my own ignorance of the Shoah in Poland.
As we all look back, it is right to credit most Germans of today: most do understand, they do know something. All children in the Munich region eventually make the mandatory school trip to Dachau, the holding zone for political prisoners. We’ve seen news stories on how school textbooks lie today in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Nicaragua, and so on; German school texts are not mendacious. The Germans I know do not deny the Holocaust, any more than they accept the mad Leninism of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof (who took their own lives when they realized the German people would never accept Red Army Faction ideology).
Germany is a liberal republic. It has been so, and stable, for 80 years—or longer than the lives of many regimes elsewhere. Its law, practices, and politics are too liberal for some. Its armed forces are under-gunned. Policing is moderate and scrutinized by jealous civilian authority. Parliament works, a gross disappointment to the Anarchist fringe, and a total frustration for the pop-up Prussians or other militants clinging to old maps of state expansion, patter about “Blood and Soil,” and stiffened martial uniforms behind museum glass.[5] If one wants to see real fascism, he may look to the honest history books, screen the documentaries made by actual witnesses, go to museums, and walk the old real grounds. Everyone should.
Christopher C. Harmon has been touring (or living) in Europe periodically since the 1970s. The lead author or editor of eight books, he teaches at The Institute of World Politics.
[1] A valuable memoir of the time is by Poland’s Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World [1944], Milton Keynes (U.K.: Penguin, 2019). He was a soldier and recorded the utter bafflement of a proud but unprepared nation that submerged as if by a double tsunami. For a less personal but masterful account of how unpreparedness and illusion may leave democracies defeated in war, see Harold W. Rood’s Kingdoms of the Blind (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1980).
[2] The argument is mine in its wording; evidence for it is in Pankiewicz (see below) and Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 (NY: Harper Perennial, 2009), 160-161, etc.
[3] Tadeusz Pankiewicz, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy [1947], trans. Garry Malloy (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013).
[4] One of the most powerful books about guerrilla warfare is J. K. Zawodny’s Nothing But Honour, a 1978 Hoover Institution Press volume on the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which that author took part. Later, Dr. Zawodny taught at Claremont Graduate School, where I was among his students.
[5] In late 2022, an eccentric nobleman and two dozen self-described “Reichsburger” were arrested for collecting arms and hoping for a coup over the federal republic of Germany. Many were elderly, and no one is missing them much.