The preserved walls of Kraków echo with a deafening silence that reveals the scars from the past
While many of the cities of Europe were ravaged and re-built after the Second World War, it is said that the beauty of Kraków saved it from Nazi destruction. Following the invasion of Poland in 1939, Warsaw was razed to the ground, and Kraków, considered by Hitler as a “German” city—from the mixed architectural styles captured in Wawel Castle to the stunning medieval Main Market Square—was named the capital of the General Government by the Third Reich. No buildings here were bombed, no battle was sieged, but Kraków would be forever changed. The scars in this city run deeper, and are in many ways harder to heal—than any of the bombarded cities of Europe.
Across the Wisła River from the breathtaking Old Town is a suburb of Kraków perhaps not as beautiful, fragments of the walls separating it from the rest of Kraków still visible with a plaque that reads: “Here they lived, suffered, and died at the hands of the German torturers. From here they began their final journey to the death camps.”
The Kraków Ghetto in the area of Podgórze was where Jewish inhabitants of Kraków were forced to relocate. As snow fell, and the sunlight dimmed, it seemed like the world turned black and white, without colour or life. I imagined the harsh conditions of those who were made to live here, who packed up their lives in Kraków to be crammed into rooms they shared with other families, starving, brutally attacked or even shot by Nazis, then systematically transported to their deaths as part of The Final Solution. The Nazis looted their houses and cleared the area of the prisoners so that all that was left was a disconcerting memory that brought a chill to my spine. A reminder of these atrocities are the bronze chairs in the Ghetto Heroes Square, where abandoned possessions of the deportees were laid beside the bodies of those shot and killed.
Just a short car ride outside of the city (much too close for comfort), the temperature hit negative double digits, the cold wind blasting at our faces and the icy ground making us slip and fall. Yet we dared not complain. Above us were the words “arbeit macht frei,” a German phrase meaning “work sets you free,” marking the entrance to Auschwitz.
