C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 21 work being carried out. The Ministry of Culture has funded some limited renovation, with more under way. In 2008 it was announced that two Italian architects, Claudio Nardi and Leonardo Maria Proli, had won the tender for the design of a Museum of Modern Art on the site. In selecting the scheme the jury felt it would ‘harmonise with the atmosphere of the former Schindler factory, and respect the emotional and historical identity of Schindler’s factory. The judges appreciated the project’s minimalism, harmony, simplicity and use of clear spatial solutions and high quality materials.’ A new building, with over 4,000 square metres of exhibition space, is to be constructed. The historic road-front factory will be restored and converted into cinema facilities, a cafe and a bookshop. The city council hopes that it will kick-start regeneration in the Krakow suburbs of Podgórze and Zablocie. There is, however, internal disagreement to this proposal from some of the city’s Law and Justice Party councillors. They argue that the building should become a Museum of the Righteous Among Nations – those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the second world war. In 2007 the city council conducted a web-based survey on the future of the factory. It claims that 48 per cent supported the art museum alone and, while 30 per cent hoped for both an art museum and a museum for the righteous, 21 per cent opposed the principle of the art museum outright. Visitor experience of sites in and around Krakow is often primed by the conditioning and expectation arising from both Keneally’s novel and Spielberg’s film. It led quickly to the development of ‘Schindler tourism’. It is perhaps not surprising that this story of humanity at the heart of the holocaust draws people to visit. A combination of audiences: the macabre, the curious, the respectful and the star struck. But even with the movie’s draw and a powerful story luring visitors, the places of the Schindler narrative today remain in various states of repair and preservation, and offer very differing levels of commemorative status. The Krakow ghetto The Krakow ghetto was established in March 1941. Jews from all over the city and surrounding area were crammed together into a few streets in Podgórze, south of the Vistula River from the main city centre. The packed ghetto area housed up to seven times its pre-war population. It was enclosed in part by walls, of which small portions still survive, shaped like rows of Jewish tombstones. In December 1942 it was divided into two areas. In March 1943 the Nazis liquidated the Krakow ghetto.Those from section A, and able to work, were marched to the labour camp in Plaszów. Those in section B, mostly women, children, the elderly and the ill, were killed in the street or transported to Auschwitz or Belzec. Unlike some other Eastern European wartime ghetto areas, such as in Budapest, where there is a stronger sense of remembrance, the site of the former Krakow ghetto is still rather a forgotten place. Until recently there has been no major commemorative structure, just the occasional plaque.The small surviving remnants of ghetto wall are scrawled with graffiti and jostling with modern life. But in 2005 a new memorial by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak was installed at Plac Bohaterow Getta. The 70 large bronze chairs which mark the site of the walls stand around the edge of a square, symbolising furniture and belongings being thrown out into the street at the liquidation of the ghetto. The low public profile of Podgórze has not been helped at all by Schindler tourism elsewhere in the city. The Spielberg film used the historic Jewish Kazimierz district to portray the ghetto rather than Podgórze itself, which was considered to be too much changed by modern development. Kazimierz is within the world heritage site for Krakow’s historic centre (inscribed 1978), while Podgórze lies outside it. Kazimierz is heavily visited for its attractive old buildings and Klezmer cafes, but also as much for its film stardom and perceived, if not genuine, Jewishness. The result was that the city made regeneration of Kazimierz a priority, and gradually a positive and prosperous air is starting to return. In Podgórze, however, still too far from the city centre for many visitors and not spared by the passage of time, the atmosphere is generally one of the rundown urban edge. Although in 2005 Steven Spielberg donated $40,000 towards the preservation of the former Pod Orlem (Under the Eagle) pharmacy, whose non-Jewish owner had remained in the ghetto to help the Jews, the Schindler effect is slow to catch on in Podgórze. The monument to all nationalities killed in the Plaszów forced labour camp. Designed byWitold Ceckiewicz, it was erected in 1964.
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