Yesterday, we ventured into the city of
Krakow. Krakow is a about an hour and 15 minutes away from Oswiecim.
While there, we toured Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945. This
museum offers the history of Krakow's population, both Polish and Jewish, of
the Krakow factory of enameled vessels, of Oskar Schindler,and of the prisoners
of Plaszow Concentration Camp he managed to save.
Oskar Schindler was a German entrepreneur
who saved the lives of over a thousand Polish Jews employed at his factory in
Krakow. His story became famous when
Steven Spielberg arrived in Krakow in March of 1993 to film Schindler’s List.
One thing that really stood out to me in
the museum was the replica of the ghetto.
It was dark and the walls were designed like cemetery tombstones. I felt very unsettled. Forcing the Jews out of them home and moving them to the ghetto was the Nazis
first way of executing them. As if that
wasn’t bad enough, they took away their right to use public transportation and
their right to attend school. Their rooms that they had to stay in were so cramped, small, and dark.
As Alexander Donat explains
in his memoir “The Holocaust Kingdom”, he describes how being sealed off from
the rest of the world affected the Jewish people in the city of Warsaw. “When
the ghetto was officially sealed off, a sociological ‘experiment’ without
parallel began. Half a million people, locked behind walls in the heart of a
great city, were increasingly isolated from the city and from the rest of the
world… [with] the real purpose of the Warsaw ghetto… [being] to exterminate its
inhabitants after robbing them of all their worldly goods” (26).
Even though this was
just replica and wasn't even half the size of a real ghetto, it painted such a
clearer picture for me. It had pictures,
facts and testimonies from Jews who went through this horrible displacement. I think everyone who has a chance should go
visit this museum. It had facts from the before the war, to the
end of the war, giving insight on very little detail of Krakow during this time. Reading and watching movies is not enough, we need to experience it with our eyes and our being and learn from this and to never let this type of actions and hatred ever happen again.
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