KrakowInformer.com

Exhibition is to commemorate ordinary people living and dying in Krakow under Nazi occupation

Oskar Schindler's office

An impression on Płaszów concentration camp

Museum has gathered original WW II pot making machines

Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory at 4 Lipowa Street, made famous by Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List movie, has recently been transformed into a new branch of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków and hosts an exhibit entitled 'Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939–1945'. Its motto is 'the factory of memory'.
The exhibition is primarily a story about Kraków and its inhabitants, both Polish and Jewish, during World War Two. It is also a story about Nazi Germans – the occupiers who arrived here on 6 September 1939, brutally disrupting Kraków’s centuries-long history of Polish-Jewish relations.
The character of Oskar Schindler and the life stories of the Kraków Jews he saved are presented in the exhibition as part of the city’s complex wartime history. Oskar Schindler’s heroic attitude is presented in close-up in his former office – luckily, the historic room located in the factory’s administrative building has been preserved intact throughout the years.
The spectator voyeuristically wanders through the city: walking down the cobbled streets, s/he pops in at a photographer’s shop, peeps into an authentic stereoscope which used to belong to a pre-war studio on Szczepańska St, boards a tram to watch a documentary portraying the everyday life of the city which is screened on the tram’s windows, walks through the narrow, labyrinthine streets of the Ghetto to visit a typical Jewish apartment, and then moves to the Płaszów camp, together with the Ghetto residents. Looking though the windows of a hairdresser’s salon s/he watches the Polish underground’s attempt on the life of Wilhelm Koppe. A moment later, looking though the window of a gloomy basement, s/he witnesses a street round-up, and finally, trapped in the fortified city, s/he waits for the Red Army to arrive.Documentary photographs, eyewitness accounts, film documentaries and multimedia presentations are put together to make a vivid, chronological vision of the city’s history.