The remains of Jewish life in Krakow

As I was essentially living in the old Jewish quarter, I decided to dedicate a day to understanding the history of the Jews of Krakow, before WWII, during, and today. It was a fascinating and sad experience.

The first stop was the Galicja Muzeum, so named for the former Galicia which encompassed southern Poland and western Ukraine before WWI and is still considered a cohesive region. This was a great museum. The first exhibit focused on the life of Jews in Lvov, a Galician city that is now in the Ukraine. Some of the quotes of people about life before and during WWII were amazing.

Wiktor Chajes: "I dream about Palestine for Jews, I believe that is the only solution to the Jewish question, but personally the Polish sea is closer to me than Palestine is... by a strange accident of fate I am both a pole and a Jew... Jewishness is with me, but inside me is Poland."

And two quotes fascinating as a pair.

Lita N.: "I was brought up in a totally worry-free environment, enjoying the pleasures lovingly bestowed on an only child in an upper class Polish-Jewish home... We were Jewish, but ours was the classic assimilated life. My parents, unlike the majority of Polish Jews, did not speak a word of Yiddish."

Milo A.: "Yiddish was the language of adults, who used it when they were speaking about something that was not meant for children's ears. But when they would start to speak in Yiddish, I would try and listen twice as carefully."

The contrast with life in the ghetto was apparent.

Dov W.: "The level of dampness was terrifying. The walls were always wet, and in winter the water froze. I slept in a narrow bed, near the wall, and often I would wake up in the mornings and my pyjamas would be frozen to the wall."

Before the war, 150,000 Jews lived in Lvov, after, only 1,000.

A second exhibit examined the Krakow of today as a means for understanding the experience of Jewish life and the loss of Jewish culture. It had excellent photography, and really seemed to explore the contradictions, sadness, and hope of Jews in Krakow. It looked at old synagogues, old cemeteries, new festivals, and more in this vein.

From the museum to a quick tour of some of the remaining buildings and areas of the Jewish quarter.

The Remuh Synagogue, home to a storied Jewish rabbi and theologian, as well as the adjacent old Jewish cemetery in a fairly good state of repair.

The Old Synagogue, the center of upper-class Jewish religious life before WWII.

The new Jewish cemetery. In contrast to the old, this one had mixed upkeep. Some graves were as new as 2001 or so. Others were overrun with weeds and falling down.

From the quarter I went south, over the bridge and into Podgorze, where the Jewish ghetto was located during German occupation.

In the main square of the neighborhood, a well-crafted memorial placed 74 empty chairs in the place where the main deportations of Jews to concentration camps occurred.

Right there, on a corner of the square, was locally famous Pharmacy Under the Eagle, a pharmacy run by a non-Jew inside the ghetto that provided untold medications during the horrible years of occupation and served as a clearinghouse for information and as a hiding place for some Jews.

And down the street, one section of the former ghetto wall remains in place. In a sign of depravity, the wall was designed to look like Jewish gravestones at the top.

And, finally, to the enamelware factory that Oskar Schindler ran. The well-known subject of "Schindler's List" managed to save 1,100 Jewish lives. The building had been converted into a just-opened museum exploring what it was like during the German occupation of Krakow from 1939-1945. The museum was very similar to the National Museum of Singapore in that it used multimedia and tried to use every sense, especially sight, sound, and touch, to engage the audience. It was a time of immense brutality.

After the day's tour, I had a better sense of what life was like before WWII and during. I can still not fathom, however, how a city that used to have such a substantial Jewish population now has only about 200 Jews.