Patrick Comerford
International Holocaust Memorial day this week (27 January 2026) marked the 81st anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, which began with the liberation of the concentration camps at Auschwitz Birkenau on 27 January 1945.
In a blog posting to mark the day, I posted a ‘virtual tour’ of Holocaust memorials I have visited in a dozen countries, but I also came across photographs I had taken of an unusual memorial in a square in Kraków that remembers the victims of the Holocaust who had first been forcibly squeezed into the ghetto and then murdered either in the ghetto or in the camps such as Auschwitz.
I visited Kraków and Auschwitz ten years ago, I wrote about the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and about the seven surviving synagogues in Kraków, the history and life of the old Jewish Quarter in Kazimierz, the Jewish cemeteries, the Salt Mines at Wieliczka, the churches in Kraków, and the castle and cathedralon on Wawel Hill. But I had only made a passing reference in a magazine feature to some of the monuments and memorials I had seen in the ghetto the Nazis had created in Podgórze, to Schindler’s's factory, or to an unusual sculpture in the Ghetto Heroes Square in the former ghetto. Yet, when I came across my photographs from Kraków and Auschwitz-Birkenau this week, my memories of that visit ten years ago were as traumatic and as sharp as yesterday, filled with heartache and tenderness at one and the same time.
The Empty Chairs Memorial, a powerful yet poignant tribute to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, is in the Ghetto Heroes Square (Bohaterów Getta Square) in the Kazimierz Jewish Quarter in Kraków. This series of empty chairs symbolised the lives abandoned and the homes left empty during the mass deportation of Jews from the Kraków Ghetto in March 1943.
Bohaterów Getta Square began as a quiet, small market place, first known as Zgody Square or Plac Zgody. In the 1930s, the square also became a local bus station.
All changed in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Zgody Square was closed off by a large gate marked with a Star of David, confining the Jewish populations to a ghetto, segregated the rest of the people of Kraków.
The Nazis issued an edict on 3 March 1941, forcing the Jews into the ‘Jewish residential quarter’ in Podgórze, ordering them to move there by 20 March. Non-Jewish residents were force to leave the Podgórze district, and Jewish families from across Kraków were forced to move into the area.
The ghetto, which functioned in Podgórze from 1941 to 1943, became the place for the brutal and savage extermination of the Jews of Kraków. The ghetto covered am area of just 20 ha and had 320 tenement houses, previously inhabited by the 3,500 people who had been forced to leave. About 17,000 Jews were crammed into 320 buildings in the ghetto, often with four or five families in one flat. Many slept on the floor; all, including children, the elderly and the sick, were forced to work; hunger and disease prevailed; and brutal treatment was a daily experience.
The only non-Jewish business not included in the order was the sole remaining pharmacy in the ghetto, run by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Pole who became the only non-Jew living in the area.
The ‘Jewish residential quarter’ was surrounded by a three-metre wall with an arcaded portion mockingly styled to resemble matzevot or traditional Jewish tombstones. Four gates led into the ghetto: the main gate had an inscription that read Jüdischer Wohnbezirk (Jewish Quarter) and stood where Limanowskiego Street enters the Main Market of Podgórze.
A tram ran along Lwowska and Limanowskiego streets, but there were no stops inside the walls, and passengers were forbidden even to look at the ghetto through the windows. Of course, that prohibition was broken, and sometimes parcels of food were dropped from a tram.
In October 1941, any departure from the ghetto without leave became punishable by death. The same penalty faced people helping fugitives. Postal services were forbidden, and all ground-floor windows on the non-Jewish side were bricked up, cutting the ghetto off from possible channels of food delivery.
Soon deportations to death camps and forced labour camps began in the ghetto. Płaszów concentration camp was originally intended as a forced labour camp, and was constructed on the grounds of the old and new Jewish cemeteries in Podgórze.
Exceedingly brutal resettlements were carried out in June and October 1942, and many people died in the streets during the roundups and transports. The painter Abraham Neuman and the folk singer and poet Mordecai Gebirtig were executed on so-called ‘Bloody Thursday’, 4 June 1942. Hospital patients and children from the orphanage were murdered on the spot or deported. Some of the deported people were executed over the mass graves already dug by the inmates in Płaszów.
The area of the ghetto was repeatedly reduced throughout 1942. Before the end of the year, it was bisected by barbed wire: precinct A was for able-bodied people capable of labour, while B was for children, the elderly, and the ailing.
Zgody Square became the site for roll-calls and selections. The police station was at the former bus terminal, the ghetto wall was nearby, and square became the place where people were selected to send from the ghetto to trains, waiting for hours for their final journey. The elderly, the sick and the young were often executed in the streets, in their homes, or even in the square.
The victims were clustered together at the west end of the square, while looted property was stacked in the centre. Tadeusz Pankiewicz, who ran the Under the Eagle Pharmacy, was an eyewitness to the horrors of daily life in the ghetto. He helped to smuggle in food and medicines, and provided fake documents to Jews living in hiding. In his memoir, The Kraków Ghetto Pharmacy, recalled ‘In Plac Zgody, an incalculable number of wardrobes, tables, sideboards and other furniture was rotting.’
Finally, on 13 and 14 March 1943, the Nazis carried out the final ‘liquidation’ of the Kraków ghetto. Around 6,000 residents of ghetto A, capable of heavy labour, were moved to the camp in Płaszów. Their children under 14 had to stay in the orphanage. On the following day, the residents of ghetto B were driven to Zgody Square. Many elderly, sick, and unemployed residents – along with children – were shot on-site, in the square or in nearby courtyards.
Around 1,000 people were shot dead on the spot, including the elderly, patients and physicians from the hospital, children and mothers who would not let them go. Many were worked to death in the camps in Płaszów and Belzec. Those who remained were taken to Auschwitz Birkenau, where they were murdered in the gas chambers. The action ended with SS officers searching the now abandoned buildings, murdering anyone who tried to hide.
The city renamed Plac Zgody as Ghetto Heroes Square in 1948 to honour the victims. For a time, it became a hub for public transport once again, but the memory of the wartime atrocities never faded. This chapter in the square’s history is retold in Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993).
Inspired by Tadeusz Pankiewicz’s memoirs, the city commissioned an installation of oversized metal chairs, symbolising what was left behind – and the absence of those who once sat there. The architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak created the monument, and it was completed in 2005.
The memorial features 33 large chairs arranged in rows, reminiscent of the roll-calls, facing the former pharmacy. Three face Lwowska Street, where a fragment of the original ghetto wall survives. An additional 37 smaller chairs for sitting encircle the larger ones. Each chair represents 1,000 lives.
Many people walk past the installation or weave their way their way through and around it, while children play and sit on the chairs, and only an odd walking tour seems to pause briefly to acknowledge it. But the empty chairs are stark and bold, sparse and empty, and they carry a powerful message with their feeling of absence. They capture a moment when human life was discarded just like the furniture piled up in the square.
A paved line through the square marks the symbolic border of the ghetto. Two dates are displayed on the old bus station building: 1941 (ghetto establishment) and 1943 (ghetto liquidation).
The memorial won the European Prize for Urban Public Space in 2006 and the Gold Award for Urban Quality in 2011.
The memorial is near other sites, including Oskar Schindler’s factory, and is a focal point for Holocaust remembrance in Kraków. In the March of Memory on 13 and 14 March each year, people march from Bohaterów Getta Square to the former Płaszów camp, following the route that led the Jews of Kraków to their death.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
