One of Cracow's most poignant annual events takes place this Sunday in the bedraggled district of Podgorze. The low-key 'March of Remembrance' recalls the liquidation of the Cracow Ghetto 63 years ago.
On March 13th 1943, the majority of the Jews that had survived the Nazi Ghetto thus far were rounded up on Plac Zgoda (which means, chillingly, Concorde, or Harmony Square) and 8000 of them were marched to the forced labour camp of Plaszow, some fifteen minutes south of the city proper. Many others were shot immediately on the streets of the Ghetto.
The meeting this Sunday will be at midday at Plac Zgoda, which is now known as Plac Bohaterow Getta (The Square of the Heroes of the Ghetto). Marchers will gather at the Chemist Under the Eagle (Apteka Pod Orlem) the famed abode of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the only gentile who managed to stay in the Ghetto area throughout the war. His chemists became a bastion of resistance to Nazi policy, and Pankiewicz was instrumental in saving many lives.
The Podgorze district is beginning to show signs of rejuvenation today, and marchers will discover the newly unveiled exposition in tribute to the plight of the Polish Jews. Pankiewicz recalled in his memoir that the marchers were forced to abandon numerous personal possessions during the evacuations. Thus chairs and furniture littered the streets after each dispatch. The architect Piotr Lewicki has created an echo of this legacy with his haunting installation on the square.
The march is a deeply moving event that reaches its culmination on the scrubby heath that once housed the Plaszow camp. There, a monument stands to the tens of thousands of victims that perished here during the war.
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