Krakow, Festival and Schindler's Factory Museum (in IHT/NYtimes web site)

I was in the Krakow for the Festival of Jewish culture, where I go every year -- the best party I know, with dozens and dozens of friends among the musicians, artists, teachers, talkers and fans who attend. I have a game: see how far I can walk without running in to someone I know, sitting down, drinking something (coffee, beer, vodka, even water....) This year, I also gave talks to a couple of visiting groups -- one from the Taube Foundation and one from GTU, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

This festival was the 20th edition of the event -- I have attended most of them.

I also was able to visit -- and write about -- the newly opened Schindler's Factory museum. Here's a link to my article that appears in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times web site

Photos (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Visitors in the Schindler’s office section of the museum. The desk was used by Schindler’s receptionist.

New Museum Tells Krakow's Stories of World War II

 By RUTH ELLEN GRUBER  (Published: July 15, 2010)

KRAKOW — In the mid-1990s, I took a “Schindler’s List” tour of sites made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning movie, which recounts how the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved the lives of 1,100 Jews by employing them at his enamelware factory in Krakow during World War II.

 

In the Schindler’s factory museum, one section of the floor is paved with swastikas that people walk on — symbolically trampling the Nazi symbol underfoot.

A guide wearing acid-green sunglasses led us in the footsteps of both Schindler and Mr. Spielberg, on a route that mixed celluloid and reality, Hollywood and the Holocaust. “This,” he said more than once, “existed in reality AND in the film.”

One of the places that existed in both was Schindler’s former Emalia factory, in a grim industrial area of the city. At the time it still operated, but as an electronic components plant. Some of the scenes from “Schindler’s List” had been shot there, and in the wake of the film’s success the staff had placed a small monument to Schindler in the courtyard.

On June 11, the factory’s sprawling administration building opened as Krakow’s newest museum, an ambitious, multimedia evocation of Krakow’s experience under Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945. Three years in the making, Schindler’s Museum (4 Lipowa Street, www.mhk.pl) cost €3.7 million, or about $4.7 million.
The new museum uses Schindler’s famous story as a springboard to recount a broader narrative that encompasses oppression and resilience, heroism and deceit.

“The history we see here is a reminder that there is an alternative to inaction, a reminder that when we learn of crimes that cry out against our conscience we cannot stand by in quiet revulsion, hoping the world will fix itself,” said the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who toured the museum during an official visit to Krakow July 3.

Formally a branch of Krakow’s Historical Museum, Schindler’s Factory is “a museum of the occupation that shows what the wartime experience was like in Krakow and shows the context of all the stories — of Jews in Krakow, of Oskar Schindler, of Cracovians, of the German occupiers,” said Edyta Gawron, a historian who was part of the team that developed the museum concept.
“Such a museum was needed,” she said. “People visit Auschwitz, but they have no idea of what life was like here in Krakow.”

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Read full article here