Kraków, part II - Ghetto Heroes' Square/Plac Bohaterów Getta and Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera

"Life makes sense, as long as you save people.."

On the second day, I went to Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera - more famously known as Oscar Schindler's Enamel Factory, made famous by the Oscar-winning Steven Spielberg film, Schindler's List. This was the only place in Krakow that I absolutely had to go to. I walked there - it was about 35 minutes of very pleasant walk from the hostel. It had rained earlier on in the day and the pavements were wet, and there was that fresh earthy smell of green twigs that is usually present after these early showers.

In the right direction, then

I stopped to look at the Ghetto Heroes' Square, which was marked by 33 empty chairs, permanently stapled to the ground, in memory of the Krakow Jews who were forcibly relocated to the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow, and then most of them murdered in concentration camps.

Plac Bohaterów Getta

Plac Bohaterów Getta

And then I walked on to Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera with both a sense of anticipation and indescribable sadness. I walked past the Wisla/Vistula river, and then I went through an underpass, where there were construction works going on, and it was a little odd, seeing this desolateness - for it was desolate - and the tourists, and the sand and cranes upon both sides, all juxtaposed together in an unlikely portrait. And I will never forget this feeling, but it was there, for some inexplicable reason, that I felt again that perfect balance between hope and despair. I've never felt so content before, or empty. It was a very strange sensation, as if there was heaven and hell within me; the soaring heights of dizzying content, along with black, nihilistic emptiness. I felt, and yet I could not feel.

Whoever saves one life
saves the world, entire

Life makes sense, as long as you save people

- Oskar Schindler

I do not cry very often, but to paraphrase one of the Aussies I met in Warszawa, who told me about his own visit to Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera, this place made me cry. Not for the people who perished and lost their lives, although that made me sad, too; but for the goodness of Oskar Schindler and how he became the better man - far beyond the capitalist merchant he once was - and saved the lives of his employees and their families and their descendants. Like the late Sir Nicholas Winton. It made me weep with joy - that there existed still such stalwart courage and compassion, in the face of such inexorable evil; and I will also never forget sitting in that dark multimedia room, watching the story of how he saved those people, and blinking away my tears, because I hate crying, and failing anyway, and brushing it away and turning so that no one would see.