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Following an edict from Hans Frank, in March 1941 the entire Jewish population of the city was crammed into a tiny ghetto over the river, south of Kazimierz, in the area around modern-day plac Bohaterow Getta. It was sealed off by high walls and anyone caught entering or leaving unofficially was summarily executed. After waves of deportations to the concentration camps, the ghetto was finally liquidated in March 1943, thus ending seven centuries of Jewish life in Krakow. The story of the wartime ghetto shot to prominence in 1994 due to Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List , based on Thomas Keneally's prize-winning book recounting the wartime exploits of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved the lives of hundreds of ghetto inhabitants. In search of authenticity, Spielberg shot the majority of the film in and around the area, sometimes using the original, surviving buildings, as in the case of the old Emalia factory, and in other cases, re-creating from scratch, for example the Plaszow camp, built in an old quarry in the south of the area. Inevitably, the success of Spielberg's film has spawned a crop of enterprises bent on exploiting the attendant tourist potential. While some may question the ethics of tourist exploitation of Holocaust memory, this needs to be balanced against the undoubted and welcome interest in Jewish culture and history that the film has generated. It's relatively easy to detect signs of past Jewish presence in what is now a quiet, rather run-down suburban district, and there is no shortage of local guides on hand to help. The most obvious is the Apteka Pod Orlem (Pharmacy under the Eagles - the old ghetto pharmacy) on the southwest corner of plac Bohaterow, now a museum (Tues-Fri 10am-4pm, Sat 10am-2pm; 2zl) containing a photographic and documentary record of life (and death) in the wartime ghetto and Plaszow camp. Its wartime proprietor Dr Pankiewicz was the only non-Jewish Pole permitted to live in the ghetto, and the exhibition touches on the sensitive question of Polish wartime aid to Jews, notably the role of Pankiewicz himself in assisting the ghetto population, as testified to in letters from the Yad Vashem Centre in Jerusalem displayed among the exhibits. The building at no. 6, on the other side of the square, was the headquarters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) which continued operating until the ghetto's liquidation. Jews were regularly deported en masse from the square to the extermination camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the bottom of ul. Lwowska, which runs southeast of the square, there's a short fragment of the ghetto wall . West of the square on ul. Wegierska is the burnt-out shell of the old Jewish theatre, while around the corner on ul. Jozefinska, today's state mint turns out to be the former Jewish bank . Casting further out in the district, the Emalia enamel factory run by Oskar Schindler, these days producing electronic component parts, still stands on ul. Lipowa (no. 4), east of the rail track. If you want to, you can look around the factory (with permission from the caretaker), many of whose features you'll recognize if you've seen the film. There's also a small exhibition displayed just inside the entrance to the building.
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