Deportation to the Krakow ghetto

This video shows archival film from the Krakow ghetto. In May 1940, the Nazi occupation authority announced that Jews were to be deported from Kraków. Of the more than 68,000 Jews in Kraków when the Germans invaded, only 15,000 workers and their families were permitted to remain. All other Jews were ordered out of the city, to be resettled into surrounding rural areas. However this policy changed with the creation of the Kraków Ghetto on 3 March 1941 in the Podgórze district, not in the Jewish district of Kazimierz.

Displaced Polish families from Podgórze took up residences in the former Jewish dwellings outside the newly established Ghetto. Meanwhile, 15,000 Jews were crammed into an area previously inhabited by 3,000 people who used to live in a district consisting of 30 streets, 320 residential buildings, and 3,167 rooms. As a result, one apartment was allocated to every four Jewish families, and many less fortunate lived on the street.

The Ghetto was surrounded by walls that kept it separated from the rest of the city. All windows and doors that gave onto the "Aryan" side were ordered bricked up. Only four guarded entrances allowed traffic to pass through. In a grim foreshadowing of the near future, these walls contained panels in the shape of tombstones. Small sections of the wall still remain today.

Young peole of the Akiva youth movement, who had undertaken the publication of an underground newsletter, HeHaluc HaLohem ("The Fighting Pioneer"), joined forces with other Zionists to form a local branch of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB, Polish: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), and organize resistance in the ghetto, supported by the Polish underground Armia Krajowa. The group carried out a variety of resistance activities including the bombing of the Cyganeria cafe, a gathering place of Nazi officers. Unlike in Warsaw, their efforts did not lead to a general uprising before the ghetto was liquidated.

From 30 May 1942 the Nazis deported people to the death camp at Belzec. On 13 - 14 March 1943 the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto was carried out under the command of SS-Untersturmführer Amon Göth. Eight thousand Jews deemed able to work were transported to the Plaszow labor camp. Others were either murdered in the ghetto or transported to Auschwitz where they were killed.