Friday, Krakow

I apologize that I am going out of chronological order! On Friday morning we had a tour of Jewish Krakow, the city formerly known as Kazimiercz (established in the Middle Ages), and incorporated into Krakow after a Swedish invasion in the early 1800s. Jews had been here since medieval times, but especially in the 15th and 15th century, they began to arrive in larger numbers after pogroms ravished their communities elsewhere--Germany, Moravia, Spain, Portugal. They began to create one of the most important jewish centers in the world. Jews and Christians co-existed very well during all of this time. The 19th century saw a loss of uniformity in the Jewish community as the Reform movement started to take root and Jews were assimilated into the culture at large and the intellectual culture and began to live in other parts of the city.
There were 65,000 Jews in krakow before WWII, 25% of the city's population (today the community is 250 Jews). Krakow was a headquarters for the German military government during the war-beginning in 1939- and therefore was not destroyed. 50,000 jews were forced to leave Krakow so the Germans could occupy it, and the 15,000 who remained were enclosed in the ghetto in March 1941 (director Roman Polanski was one of them). 15,000 people in 320 buildings over 15 streets. Most went from the ghetto to the death camps, and the ghetto was completely liquidated over 2 days, March 13-14, 1943.