I am sitting in my last airport of the trip and it reminds me that one of the greatest parts of this trip was that I went so many places without an airport!* European train travel is so convenient it feels like a waste to sit in an airport hours before the flight. But if this is what it takes to get back to the cat, so be it.**
My last stop in #teachersummer2017 #euroedition was Krakow, Poland. The train ride from Prague was the longest one yet (6 hours) but was again super easy. It was nice to have a day off from walking all over creation.***
Krakow has a picturesque old town that is miraculously still intact from WWII. While Warsaw and other parts of Poland were completely bombed out, the infrastructure of Krakow was relatively safe because it was so heavily occupied by the Nazis. In 1939, Germany set up a separate governmental state called the General Government and used Krakow as an industrial and agricultural base. One general even described Krakow as an ancient German city that had unfortunately fallen under Polish rule.****
After WWII, Krakow and Poland were under communist rule. The result is a real mashup of cultures. As two different tour guides pointed out, it justifies that Polish people love to complain. They have had a rough go of it.
I spent the first day in the old town seeing the usual suspects: the Wawel Castle, various churches on squares, and old city walls.
One square featured the ultimate cultural intersection--the importance of klezmer music and football.
The second day was spent in the Jewish Quarter and touring Schindler's Factory.***** Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter, was the center of one of the world's largest Jewish populations, about 70,000, pre-WWII. It is one of the best remaining representations of pre-war Jewish life and culture. The area houses several synagogues, a Jewish cemetery, and is currently the focus of urban renewal with shops, restaurants, and nightlife.
The neighborhood was heavily featured in the movie "Schindler's List". One of the reasons it was featured in the movie was because it has mostly retained its pre-war character. It has done so because a few years into the German occupation, the nazis evacuated the remaining Jewish population to a ghetto across the river. Kazimierz was lived in by German officers during the war.
The ghetto created by the Nazis was a few square blocks that they walled in and crammed with people. Approximately 3,000 people were evacuated from the area to house the 20,000 jews that remained in Krakow. Nearly everyone from the ghetto was eventually killed or sent to a concentration camp. The thriving Jewish community of Krakow was systematically eliminated.
The area where the ghetto was does not have much to see. Most of the buildings were knocked down and rebuilt in the communist era. So much was gone that when Steven Spielberg looked at Krakow to film "Schindler's List" and saw the ghetto as it is today, he decided to film in Istanbul. It was only after they saw the Jewish Quarter that the film crew decided to stay in Krakow. The only memorial that marks the significance of the ghetto now is a square installed with oversized empty chairs. The chairs represent the emptiness left when the Jews were killed.
A few blocks away from the ghetto is the original Schindler factory that saved about 1,200 jews. Jews that worked in the Schindler factory were treated better than in other work camps. They were not sent to the death camps and remained “hidden” from the SS until the end of the war. The factory is now an interactive museum that focuses on the occupation of Krakow by Nazi Germany and the eradication of the Jewish population. After the war, about 4,000 of the original jewish population remained and by the early 1990s, there were only a few hundred. I took no pictures in the museum. You'll have to go and learn for yourself.
On that incredible downer of a note, I leave you. Please go hug a person****** from a different religious, ethnic, or cultural background today. Maybe take down a wall or two. I'm gonna hang out with my family and cat!
-KT
* Don't get me wrong, I love being dumped into the middle of a duty-free shop, scurrying toward the exit like a rat trapped in a cheese maze.
**
***In my defense, only my phone tracks my steps and I never have it with me during the school day so those numbers are artificially low. But still, I partly took the train and partly walked all over Europe.
****Alternative fact.
*****Yes, like the movie.
******If you’re not a hugger, you can even just talk to them. Find out what they value and what is important to them and how their life is different or the exact same as your own.
******If you’re not a hugger, you can even just talk to them. Find out what they value and what is important to them and how their life is different or the exact same as your own.
