Despite the legacy of Auschwitz, Krakow remains one of the most beautiful and vibrant cities in Europe
“To find the soul of Poland, you must seek it in Krakow”, wrote the author and critic Wilhelm Feldman at the beginning of the century. As the country’s royal capital for the last 500 years and one of the only Polish cities to escape wholesale destruction by the Nazis during the Second World War, it’s certainly true that the history of Poland is etched into every stone of Krakow. Its millennium-old architecture and fairytale cobbled streets gives Krakow the sense of being left alone by the rest of the world, yet the city is alive with the Polish people’s eternally optimistic spirit – and we’re not just talking vodka. Arriving there by train after an excessively hedonistic week in Berlin, Krakow’s tranquility and slow pace of life seemed to be the perfect place in which to chill out and become a little more contemplative. Or so we thought – as it turned out, excessive hedonism Polish style wasn’t far away…
There’s little at Krakow’s somewhat beaten-up train station to indicate what lies only a few minutes walk away. After hitching up with a friendly station tout and finding a cheap room in one of the seasonally vacant university halls of residence, we jumped on a tram for the unfeasibly reasonable fare of 5p and headed into the city centre. The third largest city in Poland with three quarters of a million inhabitants, Krakow radiates out from the Rynek Glowny (Market Square), a great plaza which is the biggest medieval marketplace in Europe. The vast Cloth Hall dominates the centre of the square, while ancient churches and restaurants are arrayed around it edges. Ancient restaurants? Indeed. The Wierzynek is the oldest restaurant in Europe, dating back to 1364 when Mikolaj Wierzynek prepared a famous wedding banquet for the granddaughter of King Casimir the Great. The restaurant’s rooms show its passage through history, furnished with antique chandeliers, old battle armour and ancient clocks. If you’ve got the money, you can sample the likes of wild boar, pheasant, and partridge dishes prepared by age-old Polish methods.
A less costly pastime is hearing the trumpeter play the melody “Hejnal Mariacki” every hour from the tower of Mariacki Church. The trumpeteer plays it four times in four different directions, honouring the heroic guard who warned the city of invasion by the Turks centuries ago but was struck down by an arrow. Everyday at noon all Polish radio stations stop their programmes to play “Hejnal Mariacki ” and it is always at an exact hour, so Poles adjust their watches while listening to it.
Outside of the Square lies the imposing 11th century Wawel Castle and Cathedral, sitting on a fortified hill which overlooks the Vistula river. As the seat of Poland’s royalty for 500 years, the Castle houses an impressive museum full of precious objects. There’s also the Dragon’s Lair at the foot of the hill, a cave which now has a fire-breathing sculpture to commemorate its mythical inhabitant. If you’re looking for greenery, you’re never far from the Planty, a literal green belt as it replaced the original city walls which circled Krakow’s old town when they were demolished in the 19th century. Sadly, Krakow’s ecological forward planning hasn’t prevented the onset of acid rain attacking the city’s monuments, mainly due to the Soviet-built Lenin steel works on the city limits. Diverging off the Planty takes you back into the maze of Krakow’s sidestreets, with all of their own stories to tell. But wherever you walk, it’s difficult to get completely lost – all roads seem to eventually arrive back at the Market Square.
It’s at night that Krakow’s character really begins to show itself. Street musicians play on virtually every corner and all of them appear to be virtuosos. Forget tuneless renditions of Wonderwall – wherever you walk in Krakow, the beautiful, melancholy sound of a violin always seems to follow you. While stumbling around looking for a suitable bar in which to have our first taste of authentic Polish vodka, we stopped a group of young Poles to ask for advice. Instead of simply pointing us in the right direction, they promptly dragged us off to an excellent underground bar and lengthily introduced us to the fearsome delights of Polish drinking. This sort of friendliness, particularly when conducted through a pidgin mixture of Polish, English, German and French, is not something you’d often encounter. Would you take a random foreign student you’d been accosted by on the streets of Brighton for a night on the tiles? Exactly. But the Poles are traditionally reputed to be one of the friendliest nations on the planet and this was definitely 100 per cent proof. Over the next few days, we visited numerous bars and clubs that you wouldn’t know existed, all seemingly tucked away in the vaults of the city’s venerable buildings. Top tip: making the effort to ask the way will be richly rewarded.
Krakow, however, is also a city of painful sobriety when it comes to rememberance of the not-so-distant past. The city was the home of Oscar Schindler, and Spielberg shot much of his film about the Holocaust within Kazimierz, Krakow’s Jewish quarter. In 1939 there were about 70,000 Jews in Kazimierz; today there are around 600. Most of them died with the Auschwitz extermination camp, situated 30 miles away from Krakow. Despite the retreating Nazis’ destruction of the camp in order to try and conceal what had occurred, the remains of Auschwitz are a tangible and horrific memorial to the death of over one and half million people within its grounds. Auschwitz was divided into more than 40 camps – Auschwitz itself was a penal colony and the administrative centre, located on the outskirts of Oswiecim. Today it houses a Holocaust museum and cinema, which shows the truly terrifying film made by the Russians when they first liberated Auschwitz. The other camps were used to house those people used for slave labour, with the exception of Auschwitz-Birkenau: this was the extermination camp. The remains of the four gas chambers, each one purpose built to kill 1500 men, women and children at a time, are still clearly evident, as are the railtracks which delivered Jews from all over Europe to their death. Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote in his book The Drowned And The Saved: “In no other place and time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never were so many human lives extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism and cruelty.”
Seeing the remains of the death camp gives a fresh perspective to Krakow on re-entering the city. Despite the horrors they have seen and suffered, neither the people nor the place have capitulated to the weight of their collective memory. They remember and preserve the past, but they are also looking forward to the future. The vitality and beauty of Krakow is all the more apparent after witnessing the desolation of Auschwitz. Both are places which, for very different reasons, you can never forget.
[Originally written 1997]
