Posts tagged Krakow

In May 1940, the Nazi occupation authority announced that Kraków should become the “cleanest” city in the General Government, an occupied, but unannexed part of Poland. Massive deportation of Jews from the city were ordered. Of the more than 68000 Jews in Kraków when the Germans invaded, only 15000 workers and their families were permitted to remain. All other Jews were ordered out of the city, to be resettled into surrounding rural areas. The Kraków Ghetto was formally established on 3 March 1941 in the Podgórze district, not in the Jewish district of Kazimierz. Displaced Polish families from Podgórze took up residences in the former Jewish dwellings outside the newly established Ghetto. Meanwhile, 15000 Jews were crammed into an area previously inhabited by 3000 people who used to live in a district consisting of 30 streets, 320 residential buildings, and 3167 rooms. As a result, one apartment was allocated to every four Jewish families, and many less fortunate lived on the street. The Ghetto was surrounded by walls that kept it separated from the rest of the city. All windows and doors that gave onto the “Aryan” side were ordered bricked up. Only four guarded entrances allowed traffic to pass through. In a grim foreshadowing of the near future, these walls contained panels in the shape of tombstones. Small sections of the wall still remain today. Young peole of the Akiva youth movement, who had undertaken the publication of an underground newsletter, HeHaluc HaLohem . . .