Thursday 13 June

 Andy dropped us at the bus terminal, we were off to Krakow to spend the day with Nelson friends Anna and Phil who are ‘on tour’ through Europe.   We took a Flix Bus (network throughout Europe) departing at 7.40, arriving Krakow 8.50, meeting our friends at 9.15 to do a tour of the Jewish Quarter.   Hmmm…….  The bus notice at the stop said ‘7.50’ and we did depart then, but the driver stopped to get petrol.   Then we ran into roadworks: a couple of k’s of ripped up one lane of the highway having new hotmix put down, and I’ve never seen seven road rollers in about 100m before.  Lots of ‘UWAGA!’ signage which means ‘be careful’. And then it was city traffic and we finally got to the bus depot at 9.15.   We had the phone number of the tour guide so Pete tried to call…….it went to voicemail three times.    Taxi got caught in traffic and were we pleased to see Phil waiting in the historic Jewish Quarter square at 9.34!!   They couldn’t find the tour, had tried the synagogue, tried a tourist office with no luck; then we saw a tall young man still standing looking around (he’d been there for about 15 minutes), approached him and said ‘are you waiting for a tour?’ and he said ‘I am looking for four people’.     No tour company notice on display, just this man standing on his own.    Not entirely professional.  

But back to the bus ride – the bus was comfortable, driver excellent (other than talking on his cell phone for a few minutes), drivers we saw were very presentable with sparkling white shirts with Flix green collars and cuffs and black trousers.  Its cheap too, cost us only about $5 each for the trip, less than Nelson to Richmond!  (And I think the train ride Manchester to Leeds, about 70 minutes, cost $55 each which struck me as being expensive).    The countryside was looking very green thanks to plenty of rain recently and then the hot weather making everything grow.   There are lots of wooded areas, quite big stands of pine and beech which Andy wasn’t sure if they are milled or just woodland.   Small villages have the same square tile-roofed boxy houses, 2 – 3 storeys, very stark, painted in shades of cream to darkish yellow-beige, or just unpainted concrete.    We saw the three-chimney coal-fired power station smoking away, a bit of farmland with some hay being cut and some stretches of green fields but not an animal to be seen and not a lot of cropping.  

Anyway……..on with the tour and our guide Marcin.   It seems it’s a newish company and we’ll be giving them some feedback: the lack of signage, Marcin’s English wasn’t great and he found it difficult to formulate answers to questions,  also not thinking about walking on the shady side of the street (we did this ourselves) or stopping in bright sun when there was shade nearby.    The tour was interesting enough and we’re pleased we did it but on a day where the temperature was about 31 – 32 (not the 40 our taxi driver had told us later in the day), well, walking just wasn’t the best thing to be doing.   He gave us water which was appreciated.

We started off in the main Jewish area square near the statue of Jan Karski who had infiltrated the ghettos and camps and reported back to the Polish Government-in-Exile as well as to the allies about conditions and atrocities happening, a very brave man and a hero in Poland.    We stopped at a memorial to the Jews, where people could leave a pebble in memory of those lost – in Krakow over 20% of the population was Jewish and after the war hardly anyone was left. 

The first main stop was the old Jewish synagogue which has been turned into a museum, built against the city wall in 1492 in the gothic style but with rebuilds and changes to include arrow slits and it was known as a fortress synagogue.   It is the oldest surviving synagogue of this style.   Inside it’s very plain but they have uncovered old wall paintings that indicated it had been a mass of design and colour, some of that is on display.    There is a women’s prayer room, they stayed separate from the men.   It has a beautiful vaulted ceiling.   There is a niche at one end where the Torah is kept, and around the walls are display cases of items important to the religion including women’s headwear (must always be correctly presented).     One display was about marriage – traditionally boys could get married at age 13, girls at 12 ½ if the parents agreed.  

During the war the building was used as a magazine so I guess that’s one reason it survived, and sadly the walls were used as an execution spot for Jews.   It was looted and there was no trace of the collection of textiles and silver, but items have been donated to go on display.    Historically the courtyard was used to read out declarations from the king, public notices, and also to put curses on people who had transgressed in some way!

Next stop was a Christian church (I can remember neither the name nor the specific religion) but it had an enormous gold altar which had been upgraded by the Italians and apparently they got a bit carried away.  The photo doesn’t show the brightness of the gold but it’s quite a sight.  And the organ was magnificent, too high to get a good photo unfortunately but I think the Italians had been at it too.   There was a lovely side chapel, very peaceful-looking.   You have to be sensitive if people are praying of course, and there was no-one there, but when I turned round I almost tripped over a nun on one side and a young priest although he really looked too young.  Very tall, blond, handsome, cassock made of an obviously good fabric, and when he knelt to pray he was very fastidious about arranging the hem beautifully over his heels.

The heat was really getting to us but we trudged on, over the Bernatek footbridge with its circus performer life-size bronze (?) figures above us, past part of the ghetto wall which is built with a scalloped top to resemble tombstones, and on to the chair memorial at the Ghetto Heroes Square with its 33 memorial chairs made of bronze and iron.  I think the building there was a German HQ of some sort, and there was an execution wall just around the corner.   The area was a market square nearly 200 years ago when it was a separate town, but now the memorial is for the Polish Jews who died in the Krakow ghetto between 1941 and 1943.   Over 20,000 people were kept within the ghetto walls, previously home to only 3000.

Marcin provided tickets and left us at the Schindler factory/museum, three storeys dedicated to the work of Oskar Schindler with the first part being a timeline of the German occupation and the second was more about the Schindler factory.   We were there for close to two hours but really there was just too much to take in during a single visit.    We saw how the Jews were gradually pushed out of their jobs and homes, how life gradually changed and what happened to them.  Some of the exhibits were housed in cases resembling the 'tombstone'-like walls of the ghetto.

They had an excellent looped film showing interviews with people who had worked in the factory and it told how Schindler looked after his workers with good medical care, decent food supplied a couple of times a day, and of course he spirited away approximately 1200 people away almost overnight.  He had a list of names who were to be taken by the Germans and he called a meeting which was a mass ‘dismissal’, then when the Germans came with their list each name read out was greeted with ‘dismissed’.   Schindler was German, seemed to have a finger in many pies, often had important Germans visiting, maybe he was a bit on the ‘dodgy’ side but his heart was in the right place.  

The factory made enamelware and artillery shells amongst other things and workers were able to contaminate the shells, for instance, to weaken them and that was one way of getting at the Germans.   In one room there was a large glass cube containing thousands of tin/enamel plates of various sizes and shapes, it was hollow and inside you could read the names of all 1200 who were saved.  

We got a cab to just off the Market Square after that, all four of us well and truly ready for a light lunch and copious quantities of fresh orange juice to restore the energy levels.     Andy met us at about 3.30 and we all had a nice cooling icecream, the day not having got any cooler.   Our last stop was the underground museum underneath the market square which shows excavated streets which were destroyed in a big fire, shows where a line of metalwork shops was, a raised wooden ‘bridge’ across a street, the remains of a cart, and many artefacts they’d dug up.  There’s the remains of a cemetery which include people buried as ‘vampires’ (heads chopped off and buried beside the bodies).  The main part is rows of ‘booths’ which are a bit like those in the Cloth Hall now, very well done with low ceilings (because the market square has been rebuilt on top again) but they are dark mirrored panels so it doesn’t seem oppressive.   The walkway is glass, built over top of the graves in one part, and over the partitions in one long stretch.   The excavations began in 2005, and I think the museum has been open for about four years.

We were all ready for dinner so (after navigating our way around a cycle race going round and round the square with only one crossing point – run fast between bunches of riders) we went to a popular restaurant just by the castle.  Good meal, good service, good company – and you can’t say no to the cherry vodka they always dish up when you pay the bill.      It was an excellent day out and great to share some of what we’d previously seen and enjoyed in Krakow with Anna and Phil, and to go to some new places as well.    We even managed a bit of shopping in the pedestrian precinct leading to the castle.   Its cobbled and we could see its definitely not for anyone with high heels (not us, we were on foot and must have done well over 13,000 steps for the day.

So that was pretty much the last of our Polish holiday, but we’ll see the family again in Croatia in a couple of weeks.