To walk Ghetto Hero’s Square is to understand that there was no escape route

After the memorial to inmates of Krakow’s ghetto, the buoyant optimism of a road trip is tempered by a reminder of the refugees’ 'choiceless choices'.

This article is Part Two in a Three-Part Series. Read Part One here.

The YIVO study tour group assembles on July 1. We are bussed to the Ghetto Hero’s Square, formerly known as Plac Zgody. The square is scattered with larger-than-life iron chairs, installed on the site of the Umschlagplatz where the ghetto inmates were assembled before being marched to the station. The chairs are arranged in a grid and fixed to the ground on metal platforms.

The memorial was designed by architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak. Piotr stands on the pavement opposite the square and explains how they arrived at the design. They immersed themselves in the details of the ghetto’s history, read eye-witness accounts, and sifted through the archives.

The ghetto was established in March 1941, here, in the suburb of Podgorze. Jews from all over Krakow were enclosed behind purpose-built walls and barb-wire fences. The ghetto was liquidated in March 1943. The last inmates were killed on site or marched to the station to be transported to the death camps. They left behind a mass of possessions and rotting furniture. Lewicki and Latak chose the chair as representative of the abandoned belongings.

The square is still fronted by a bus station. The pre-war bus station, which was converted into the ghetto police station, remains intact. The date, 1941-43, is engraved on the pediment. Passers-by, consciously or otherwise, interact with the chairs, as they do with other objects: wastepaper bins, traffic signs, bicycle parks, and tram-stop awnings. To walk the square, and the surrounding streets, is to understand that there was no escape route. Wherever the inmates may have run, whatever part of the wall they may have scaled, they were easy targets.