The liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto

On Saturday 13 March 1943 units of the SS and the German police surrounded the Kraków Ghetto in Podgórze. Within two days the Germans drove out all its inhabitants. Those they judged fit for work were marched in columns to the new forced labour camp at Płaszów. The old, the sick and the children were killed in their flats, in the hospital and on the streets, or deported to Auschwitz. Some 2,000 people were killed on the spot. The action in the streets of the ghetto was directed by Amon Göth, who had been commandant of the Płaszów camp for a month. So ended the ghetto in Poland’s former capital, which the occupier had turned into the capital of the General Government.

The Jews of Kraków under occupation

Before the war Kraków was one of the most important centres of Jewish life in Poland. According to various estimates it was home to between about 56,000 and more than 60,000 Jews, roughly one in four of the city’s inhabitants; thousands of refugees from the west arrived in the autumn of 1939. The heart of the community was Kazimierz, with its synagogues, schools and kehilla (community council).

Persecution began as soon as the Germans took Kraków on 6 September 1939. Jews were rounded up for forced labour, synagogues were closed, and flats, shops and workshops were requisitioned. From 1 December 1939 Jews throughout the General Government had to wear armbands with the Star of David. As early as 8 September the Germans ordered the creation of a Judenrat; its first chairman was the teacher Marek Bieberstein (PL), who was arrested in 1940.

Kraków became the seat of the Governor-General, Hans Frank, who installed himself in Wawel Castle and wanted the “German” city to be free of Jews. In the spring of 1940 it was announced that the Jews were to leave. By the spring of 1941 tens of thousands of people had been expelled or forced into “voluntary” departure for the small towns of the Kraków district. Around 15,000 remained in the city – mainly those whose labour the Germans needed, together with their families.

The ghetto in Podgórze

By order of the governor of the Kraków district, Otto Wächter, of 3 March 1941, the Jews had to move by 20 March into a designated part of Podgórze, on the right bank of the Vistula. On 21 March the district was sealed. More than 15,000 people were crammed into some 20 hectares, 320 buildings with just over 3,000 rooms; later, when Jews from surrounding towns were moved into the ghetto, their number rose to about 20,000. In practice there were three people to every window. The Polish residents of this part of Podgórze moved into the flats in Kazimierz that the Jews had vacated.

The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire and, from April 1941, by a wall whose top was shaped like matzevot – Jewish gravestones. Sections of this wall survive to this day in Lwowska and Limanowskiego streets. The gates were guarded by German gendarmes and Polish officers of the “Blue Police”, while order inside was kept by the Jewish Order Service. Many inhabitants left the ghetto every day in columns to work outside it: at the cable factory in Płaszów, at brickworks, at Rakowice airfield and at Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory in Zabłocie. Inside the ghetto there were sewing rooms and workshops, among them Julius Madritsch’s textile works.

From 15 October 1941, under a decree issued by Frank, Jews leaving the ghetto without a pass faced the death penalty – as did Poles who hid or helped them.

The actions of 1942

In the spring of 1942 Operation Reinhard – the murder of the Jews of occupied Poland organised by Odilo Globocnik – reached the General Government. From March the Bełżec extermination camp was in operation, receiving Jews from the districts of Lublin, Galicia and Kraków. In July Heinrich Himmler ordered the “resettlement” of the Jews of the General Government to be completed by the end of the year; in Warsaw the Great Deportation began at that time.

In Kraków the first great deportation took place as early as the turn of May and June 1942. The pretext was a check of identity cards: anyone who did not receive a German stamp was sent for “resettlement”. People were assembled on Plac Zgody (Harmony Square) – today Ghetto Heroes Square – and marched to the station at Prokocim, from where the trains left for Bełżec. Sources state that over a few days in June between about 6,000 and 7,000 people were deported (some studies put the total as high as 11,000), and several hundred were shot on the spot. One of the victims, on 4 June, was the folk poet Mordechai Gebirtig, author of the song “It Is Burning” (S’brent), written after the pogrom in Przytyk. The chairman of the Judenrat, Artur Rosenzweig (PL), who refused to hand people over to the Germans, was dismissed and deported with his family to his death. His place was taken by Dawid Gutter, who was compliant towards the Germans. On 20 June the area of the ghetto was reduced.

The second action took place on 27–28 October 1942. This time, according to various sources, between about 4,500 and 7,000 people were deported to Bełżec, and several hundred were killed on the spot – among them patients from the hospital, residents of the old people’s home and children from the orphanage. The ghetto was reduced once again, and in December it was divided by barbed wire into two parts. Ghetto “A” was to house those with work and their families, ghetto “B” the unemployed, the old and the sick. Everyone understood what this division meant.

Resistance

From 1942 an underground organisation of Jewish youth, which grew mainly out of the Zionist organisation Akiva, was active in the ghetto. Its leaders – Adolf (“Dolek”) Liebeskind, Szymon Dränger and his wife Gusta Dawidsohn-Dränger – formed the Kraków branch of the Jewish Combat Organisation. They knew they could not save the ghetto; they wanted Jews not to go to their deaths without a fight. Since an uprising in the cramped ghetto had no chance, they carried the fight into the “Aryan” city. On the evening of 22 December 1942 the fighters, together with members of the communist People’s Guard, threw grenades into the Cyganeria café in Szpitalna Street, frequented by German officers and officials; at least several Germans were killed or wounded, though sources differ on the number of casualties. In the following days the Gestapo broke up the organisation: Liebeskind was killed on 24 December, the Drängers fell into the hands of the Gestapo, and Gusta, in her prison cell, wrote her “Justyna’s Diary” on scraps of paper. When the liquidation came, there was no longer any force in the ghetto capable of armed resistance.

The Płaszów camp and its new commandant

In the autumn of 1942 the Germans began building a forced labour camp south of the ghetto, on the site of two Jewish cemeteries in Jerozolimska and Abrahama streets. The graves were dug up, barracks were put up in their place, and the roads were paved with gravestones. On 11 February 1943 command of the camp was taken over by SS-Untersturmführer Amon Göth, a 34-year-old Austrian who had previously organised round-ups and transports to the extermination camps on Globocnik’s staff in Lublin. He was to make the camp ready to receive the ghetto’s inhabitants within a few weeks.

The decision on the final liquidation was taken by the SS and Police Leader of the Kraków district, SS-Oberführer Julian Scherner. The operation was prepared by his chief of staff, SS-Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Haase (PL), and Göth commanded it on the ground in the ghetto. Units of the SS and police were deployed, men of the Sonderdienst (special service) and – according to some sources – guards trained at the SS camp at Trawniki (PL). Polish policemen formed a cordon around the walls.

13 March: ghetto “A”

On the morning of 13 March the Judenrat and the Jewish police announced that the inhabitants of ghetto “A” were to assemble with hand luggage to be moved to the Płaszów camp. The Germans forbade them to take children under 14; these were to stay in the ghetto and go to a supposed “children’s home”. Parents faced a choice that defies description. Some gave their children sleeping draughts and smuggled them out in rucksacks and sacks; others handed them to Polish acquaintances or pushed them out through the wire, hoping they would somehow survive. Many children remained in the ghetto with their grandparents or alone.

All through that Saturday columns of people were marched under escort through the streets of Podgórze to Płaszów. According to various sources, between about 6,000 and 8,000 people were taken to the camp over the two days of the action, including members of the Judenrat and the Jewish police with their families. The camp, still under construction, became overnight one of the largest labour camps in the General Government. According to survivors, Göth greeted the new prisoners by telling them that he was now their god.

14 March: ghetto “B”

On Sunday 14 March it was the turn of ghetto “B”, inhabited by people the Germans regarded as superfluous: the old, the sick, the unemployed and children. A selection was carried out on Plac Zgody. Several hundred people still judged fit for work were added to the prisoners of Płaszów. The rest were killed on the spot: in the square, in courtyards, in flats and in hiding places which the SS men searched house by house. In the ghetto hospital the sick were shot in their beds; according to survivors, some of the doctors had earlier given poison to the gravely ill to spare them death at the hands of the SS. Survivors later testified that Göth himself shot people in the streets.

The bodies of the dead were taken by lorry to Płaszów and buried in mass graves. Part of the population of ghetto “B” – some 3,000 people, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – was deported by the Germans to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the selection on the ramp, 499 men and 50 women were admitted to the camp, and the rest, about 2,450 people, were murdered in the gas chambers. For several days more – until 16 March, according to some studies – the Germans dragged out of hiding people who had managed to conceal themselves.

The toll

The figures given by the sources differ, because the Germans kept no precise records and some documents were destroyed. It is most commonly accepted that during the liquidation some 2,000 people were killed in the ghetto itself, between 6,000 and 8,000 were taken to Płaszów and between 2,000 and 3,000 were deported to Auschwitz, most of whom died on the day of their arrival. Together with the actions of June and October 1942, this meant that within ten months the Germans had killed or sent to their deaths the overwhelming majority of the Jews they had confined in Podgórze in 1941.

A labour detail of prisoners remained in the deserted ghetto for several more months, sorting the furniture, clothing and household goods left behind; anything of value was taken over by German offices. The flats were later occupied by new tenants, and most of the ghetto wall was demolished.

Witnesses and rescuers

The most important witness of those days was the Polish pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz, owner of the Pod Orłem (Under the Eagle) pharmacy on Plac Zgody – the only Pole who, with German permission, lived and worked within the ghetto throughout its existence. His pharmacy was a meeting place for the ghetto’s intelligentsia, a contact point and a refuge; Pankiewicz and his assistants often dispensed medicines free of charge, kept the documents and valuables of those being deported, and passed messages to the “Aryan” side. From the pharmacy windows he watched the selections on Plac Zgody in June and October 1942 and the massacre of 14 March 1943. He described them in his book The Cracow Ghetto Pharmacy, published as early as 1947. In 1983 Yad Vashem honoured him with the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

Among the prisoners taken to Płaszów were the workers of the enamelware factory of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party who had grown rich in Kraków on cheap Jewish labour. After the liquidation of the ghetto Schindler obtained permission to set up a sub-camp beside his factory in Zabłocie, where his workers were to some extent protected from Göth’s terror. In the autumn of 1944 he moved the factory to Brünnlitz (Brněnec) in Moravia, and in this way saved, according to various estimates, some 1,100–1,200 Jews. Their story was popularised by Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List, in which the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto is one of the longest sequences.

Some children and adults managed in March 1943 to escape from the ghetto or from the columns and to survive on the “Aryan” side, hidden by Poles – often for money, not infrequently selflessly, always under threat of the death penalty. Among the survivors of the Kraków Ghetto were the future film director Roman Polański and the haematologist Julian Aleksandrowicz.

Its place in the war

The liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto was part of the last phase of Operation Reinhard, in which in 1943 the Germans liquidated the remaining ghettos in the General Government, leaving alive only those Jews whose labour they still considered indispensable – from then on confined in camps under SS supervision. Three months earlier, on 17 December 1942, the Allied governments, in their declaration on the extermination of the Jews, had publicly accused Germany of murdering Jews in occupied Poland and promised that those responsible would be punished. It had no effect whatever on the course of the crime.

A month after the events in Kraków, on 19 April 1943, when the Germans moved to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Combat Organisation and the Jewish Military Union took up armed struggle – unlike in Kraków, where the underground had been crushed before the liquidation. In September 1943 Göth liquidated the ghetto in Tarnów. The Płaszów camp kept growing; in January 1944 it became a concentration camp subordinate to the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, tens of thousands of prisoners passed through it, and in May 1944 its commandant sent the prisoners’ children to Auschwitz. In the summer and autumn of 1944 the Germans dug up the mass graves at Płaszów, including the graves of the victims of March 1943, and burned the bodies to cover up the traces of the crime.

Of Kraków’s Jewish community of several tens of thousands, between about a thousand and several thousand people survived the war, according to various estimates. Amon Göth was tried in 1946 before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Kraków; the liquidation of the ghetto was among the crimes for which he was sentenced to death. The ghetto wall in Lwowska Street, Pankiewicz’s pharmacy – today a branch of the Museum of Kraków – and the empty chairs on Ghetto Heroes Square bear witness to what happened in Podgórze on 13 and 14 March 1943.