Krakow is easily Poland’s best destination: a beautiful, old-fashioned city buzzing with history, enjoyable sights, tourists, and college students. Krakow is simply charming and, more than any town in Europe, it seems made for aimless strolling. It’s mercifully compact, flat and easy to navigate. We toured the old town and the main market square then climbed the Wawel hill to the historic castle, museum and Poland’s national church. Later we walked to Kazimierz with Jewish landmarks and Holocaust sites, including Oscar Schindler’s enamel factory museum. This is the place where Schindler, a German, hired 1200 Jews as factory workers and protected them from certain death by giving them paperwork claiming they were essential workers. If you’ve ever watched the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List, you know the story, and it was filmed right here! The 65 chair sculptures in “Hero’s Square” represent the 65,000 Jews from Krakow, more than a quarter of the city’s pre-WWII population, who were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Only a few thousand Krakow Jews survived the war and today the current Jewish population in Krakow numbers only 200! We finished the evening with a rooftop nightcap overlooking the beautiful Vistula River which flows from the mountains of southern Poland through the entire country before emptying in the Baltic Sea near Gdańsk.
saretsky7
beautiful!