October 10, 2023

Dateline – Krakow, Poland

I.m turning in relatively early this evening as I have to be up early in order to catch the bus down to the Danube. I don’t know which way we’re going, only I know we catch the boat somewhere outside of Budapest so that involves traversing most of Slovakia. My one kvetch about this trip is that there is no stop in Budapest, one of my favorite cities when we are so close. Ah well, I’ll have to make another trip to pick that up again. I’ve been looking at the river cruise from Budapest to Varna down the Danube and at trips to Croatia and Montenegro so I should be able to add on to one of those.

This morning was a trip to Jewish Krakow. More accurate to say what was Jewish Krakow. In 1939, roughly a quarter of the population of the city was Jewish, about 60,000. Today there are two synagogues with a combined total of less than 300 members. The Holocaust wiped out 99% of the Polish Jewish population – 3 million to about 30,000. And there are cases of the survivors being massacred by their neighbors when they returned to try and reclaim their lands and property after the war. I have noticed that those countries of Eastern Europe I have visited with an authoritarian drift in recent years (Poland, Hungary) have taken to downplaying the role of the native populations and governments in assisting the Nazis, trying to place blame solely on the Germans. The Germans couldn’t have been anywhere near as efficient as they were without local help.

The morning began with a trip to the site of the former Krakow ghetto (made famous by Schindler’s List) where many of the original buildings still stand and the park with the hill from which the Germans watched the liquidation is still very much in evidence. What I had not realized until visiting was the actual geography of events. The ghetto, just across the river from the traditional Jewish quarter, was small, and the thought of 50,000 people squeezed into that urban space designed for about 3500 is discomfiting. The Schindler factory, which still stands, is only a short walk away, just outside of the ghetto borders. (The walls and gates have long been dismantled but there are marks on the street where the gates stood). The factory has been converted into two museums, one about the experiences of war time Krakow (not exclusively focused on the Jewish population and a very good use of multimedia exhibits) and a museum of modern art (which I skipped). The limestone quarry and site of the Plaszow work camp where the survivors of the ghetto were sent under the monstrous Amon Goeth is only about a half mile away, just south of the Park with the hill.

Later in the morning, a visit to the oldest synagogue in Krakow still in use, since the 1500s with some of the original decoration still intact, and its attached cemetery with gravestones stretching back centuries. The walls of the cemetery were constructed in modern times from the pieces of the gravestones from the Jewish cemetery the Nazis destroyed in setting up Plazow where they used the broken pieces for paving. They have been cleaned, assembled into a mosaic of memory and it’s very moving. I then poked around the winding streets for a while before heading back to the hotel for a nap and then drinks with Michele DeVita Goodwin and her husband and sister who just happened to be in town this week as well. Much discussion of Birmingham theater. I then had an early supper of carbonara, tiramisu and red wine before heading upstairs to sack out.

My recent immersion in Holocaust history of course brings to mind the horrific happenings in Israel and Gaza this week. I’ve looked at Twitter and Threads where various pundits are trying to boil down an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation down to absolutes, one way or another. It’s messy. (I smell the fingerprints of the last administration and the likely sale of state secrets behind the scenes). I am no fan of Bibi. I stand with Israel on responding to an attack on their civilian population by Hamas. Hamas, funded by the outside, more or less came to power over the objections of most of the Palestinians and their civilians should not be punished for something they had no hand in. Go after the organization left right and sideways but sweeping the Gaza Strip into the sea, when it’s population is mainly women and children, is not necessarily the way to do it. The Holocaust is still living memory, although the current survivors are now in their 90s and older, despite some political forces desire to rewrite history.