In Kraków’s Jewish Quarter, a traveller reflects on its gentrification–from the scene of historical atrocities to a magnet for bohemian tourists–as she considers the validity of her own sense of shame and how the modern world may not be too far from the past. This story was written by a student on our Craft of Travel Writing Certification course.
“The world is divided into heroes, regular people, and scumbags,” says Jakub. “Most people aren’t heroes.”
The silence sags under the weight of this remark. Jakub—a sinewy, spark-eyed Cracovian—stands on the corner of Józefa Street, waiting for thirty tourists to process it. He has likely uttered these words many times, watching eyes drop to the ground, hearing questions formulate in minds.
Being part of a tour group is a strange experience; it’s a few short hours during which individual lives collapse into homogeneity. In Kazimierz, Kraków’s historic Jewish quarter, tourists walk through a place shaped by one of the greatest monstrosities of human history.
No one can know if they would have been among the minority who sheltered fleeing Jews during the war. But they could try to answer one question, at least: what is our responsibility to this place?
I’d known little about Kazimierz when booking a last-minute Airbnb on Józefa Street. Life events had prevented much prior research, a discomforting situation for a keen planner, and I arrived in the city armed only with an education from history lessons, a few documentaries, and one blockbuster film.
Guilt has a habit of deepening when a place begins to captivate.
Kazimierz is the bohemian heart of Kraków, and Józefa Street is a major artery. Crooked cafés serve fruit teas under hanging planters; cavernous bars lurk at the foot of staircases, waiting for night; huddles of students in black leather eat zapiekanki, a Polish street snack staple. From spray-and-dash graffiti to Art Nouveau-inspired commemorative murals—one of which takes up an entire brick façade—street art covers almost every inch of available surface. Józefa Street itself is a welcome runway of open doors, smiling craftspeople, and trinkets jangling in their displays.
Recently, I’ve grown more and more self-conscious about being a tourist. Any attempt to lighten my baggage (a combination of ignorance, Englishness, reliance on GPS, and the cumbersome presence of actual baggage) triggers an almost survivalist instinct. I’m determined to avoid both tourist traps and speaking English, even though I speak no Polish. It’s part of an oddly vehement desire to break through the surface layer of a new place, like biting through the pastry of a kremówka.
My travel partner, patient enough to deserve her own hagiography, eventually grows exasperated. On our way to the tour meeting point, she reminds me that we are tourists. What’s so difficult to deal with?
Perhaps this tour will be a way to overcome the tourist guilt.
After Józefa Street, Jakub leads us in single file past a ripped-up portion of road. A digger’s bony elbow guides the eye towards the Old Synagogue, a flat-roofed, red-brick imprint on an electric blue sky. Autumn in Kraków has announced itself in style, rooftops garnished and courtyards glazed in shades of amber and apricot. For an afternoon in late October, the air is warm, radiating from the bricks with a firm pressure.
Squinting into the sun, Jakub gestures towards the building. The tour group huddles, eager to learn.
Fleeing persecution in Western Europe in the thirteenth century, the Jewish People were welcomed in the Kingdom of Poland. The Statute of Kalisz offered protection against persecution, granting Jews economic, legal, and religious autonomy. Kazimierz’s Old Synagogue, the oldest in the country, was in use for five hundred years before it was looted by the Nazis. During the war, Jews were shunted across the river to the ghetto in Podgórze, before being deported to be massacred.
Before World War II, there were approximately 60,000 Jews living in Kraków. Just 1,200 remain.
Jakub speaks precisely and passionately, sculpting the air with his hands. He has an MA from the Jagiellonian University, writing his thesis, Erosion of the National Narrative in Contemporary Guidebooks to Kazimierz.
Ah, the guidebook, the extension to the tourist’s arm. It might have pointed me towards Kraków’s vodka bars, but it would not stride confidently through its streets or linger by its buildings. It would not look me in the eye while telling stories of national solidarity and Polish Jewish resistance, or ask things that forced me to question what I was really doing here.
One member of the group brings up Schindler’s List. Jakub smiles: he has much to say on the topic of Spielberg’s seven-time Oscar winner. Shot in Kazimierz on account of the area’s visual appeal—despite it not being the actual location of the wartime ghetto—many of the film’s scenes played out exactly where we’re standing now.
Indeed, the enquirer’s timing is perfect.
“This way,” says Jakub. He leads us into a courtyard, past a vine trellis of grapes left to raisin. “Look.”
Opposite the vines is a staircase I would ordinarily have walked straight past, had I not looked for a moment longer.
It’s a famous location from a scene in Schindler’s List, in which Mrs Dresner hides under the stairs as the Nazis liquidate the ghetto. Even as we look, the scene is disturbed by jostling camera lenses. A man in a suit pushes through the throng, irritated. He glances at Jakub with an expression I translate to typical tourists, before wondering if this is unfair.
Perhaps Jakub would have preferred that we walk straight past. He explains that the fascination with Kazimierz that erupted after the film’s success was not simply a remembrance activity, but a kind of parasocial event that affected the Jewish people still living there. Modern bohemianism was born from barbarism. A blockbuster means tourists, means gentrification, means rising prices…and makes it possible for an English traveller to book an affordable Airbnb on Józefa Street.
Mrs Dresner’s staircase even shares its courtyard with the popular Wódka Café Bar, where I sat the previous night, deep into a tasting flight of colourful local spirit.
Shame sits heavy, somewhere in the stomach.
Jakub holds our gazes. There is a shift in the group, as though we have all suddenly sat down.
We move on.
By the time we cross the river to Podgórze, the sun has fallen, and the water melts under a brassy sky. Watching Jakub forge ahead, I wonder how many times he has delivered this tour. His comment about heroes and scumbags is a reminder that he is not teaching a history lesson but presenting a national narrative that speaks urgently to our humanity—whether Polish or British, guide or tourist, expert or unschooled.
The final half hour takes us to Plac Bohaterów Getta: Ghetto Heroes Square. It’s a haunting memorial of empty chairs, set wide enough apart for ten people to line up between them. An eerie assembly of absentees, they wait to be occupied, though no one ever will.
Here, Jakub parks us back in the present. Pointing to a beige building with dollhouse windows, he explains that this was the wartime pharmacy of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who smuggled toddlers out of the ghetto by providing safe sedatives that would keep them asleep long enough to remove them quickly.
I glance at everyone else, wondering if they’re thinking the same thing.
One of the heroes.
It took a war and a genocide to prove the point that most people did not protect fleeing Jews. A story of Jakub’s own family illuminates this. His grandmother, a young girl during wartime, has spoken about her memory of a flurry of knocks on the door of their village house; her father opening it to a desperate Jewish man seeking anywhere to hide.
Jakub’s great-grandfather apologised. There was nothing he could do.
The Jewish man was killed.
“It is estimated that it took three to eleven Polish people to protect one Jewish life,” Jakub tells us.
A tram trundles across the square. Inside, a teenage boy rests his head on his girlfriend’s shoulder. In front, a mother scoops up her straying toddler. Over the road, RadioZET floats from cars on the homebound commute.
I am not closely connected by blood to this history, and my trip to Kraków wasn’t a personal pilgrimage. Before meeting Jakub, I’d been searching for a vague sense of acceptance in each new place, hoping some unnameable experience would carry me beyond its tourist-friendly veneer. After the tour, it becomes clear that the most important thing anyone can do in a new place is listen to its stories. Through his own, Jakub has reached towards a sense of morality and justice that transcends the barriers of language, geographical borders, and time.
He doesn’t speak much about modern politics, but there’s an awareness left unsaid. For most of the group, as Western Europeans or Americans, the Russian threat is far away, the material of headlines. For the Poles, it’s tangible. The very day I booked my flight, Russian drones entered Polish airspace, causing Poland to invoke NATO’s Article 4.
Jakub’s eyes, tightened by laugh lines, are steely with quiet urgency. The history we have walked through makes the present all the more real.
When the tour ends, I shake his hand, and he waves away praise.
Afterwards, a few minutes’ walk takes me to the remains of the ghetto wall, which resembles an unbroken line of headstones. There is a bunch of red roses attached to it.
Back on Józefa Street, I pass an outline of Ukraine sprayed beneath a window. The artist has used its east-west distance to represent a conference table: Trump at one end, Putin at the other.
I think about the roses. Three to eleven Poles to protect one Jewish life.
The world commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 every year.
