Krakow, Poland - The snow was thawing when I walked through the concrete tunnel under the railway line. Museums – great museums – should be on grand avenues with marble halls, but the one I was aiming for is surrounded by industrial buildings and potholes reflecting a grey sky. It’s as though the surroundings are part of the exhibits.
Among all the grey, I’m searching for a little girl in a red coat. In March 1941, the remainder of Krakow’s Jewish population of 63 000 souls had made this short walk from the district of Kazimierz – their traditional home for more than five centuries – across the Vistula River to a new ghetto established here in the industrial suburb of Podgorze.
The ghetto was liquidated 70 years ago on March 13 and 14, 1943 with huge loss of life, but it’s an event 20 years ago that may serve to bring the horrors of the Holocaust closer to home. In April 1993, Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List finished shooting and opened to public acclaim, winning seven Academy Awards.
It tells the story of a “member of the Nazi party, womaniser and profiteer” – Oskar Schindler – and the 1 200 Jews he saved. In fact it’s Schindler’s factory – now part of the Krakow Historical Museum – that I’m on my way to see.
As you hand in your coat, you get a hint of the world you are about to enter. The coat tag is large and enamelled to remind you that you are in the entrance to the Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik – the factory where Schindler made pots and pans for the German army using an increasingly Jewish and therefore low-cost workforce, marched in every day from the nearby ghetto.
The museum does not confine itself to the history of Schindler but covers the occupation of Krakow from September 1939 right through to what the Poles call the second occupation – that of Soviet forces from 1945 to 1989.
It’s a collection of echoes from the past – sounds, room sets and letters – that break down the statistics.
The inclusion of a No 3 tram reminds you that it ran, without stopping, through the ghetto with seats reserved for Germans. Boys would throw bread out of the windows to the ghetto’s occupants. Film director Roman Polanski may well have caught a small loaf while living in the ghetto as an eight-year-old.
He wrote a short note then which shows why many think his film about the Warsaw Ghetto, The Pianist, is one of his best. Knowing that Holocaust studies are compulsory in Poland and in Germany, I listened to the guides asking how many young visitors had seen Schindler’s List.
One or two hands went up. Even allowing for the film’s imperfections to the purist, I’d suggest a viewing would give any visitor a head start.
At the end of your visit, standing beside Schindler’s desk, while listening to the tales of his 1 200 surviving Schindlerjuden, it may be difficult to separate Hollywood from reality.
As you watch Spielberg’s film, shot in black and white, there’s a glimpse of colour as Schindler sees the liquidation of the ghetto. A little girl, unaccompanied and untouched, walks through the horror. It’s at this point that Schindler realises that only he can save his Jewish workers.
Fact or fiction? Many survivors talk of seeing – in whatever camp – a little girl in red.
If you need reminding, then Auschwitz, with all its horrors, is just an hour’s drive away. – The Daily Mail
l For further information, visit www.poland.travel