Moments from Ghetto Heroes Square

Plac Bohaterow Getta, in Krakow's Podgorze district, was the central square of the Nazi-established Krakow Ghetto during the Second World War, the site from which most of the ghetto's Jewish residents were eventually deported to Plaszow and Auschwitz. In 2005, architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak installed a memorial across the square consisting of seventy oversized bronze chairs, scattered as though abandoned mid-flight, a direct reference to the furniture and belongings that ghetto residents were forced to leave behind, thrown from windows into the street, when the ghetto was finally liquidated in 1943.

The memorial works precisely because it refuses conventional monumentality, there's no statue, no plaque you're meant to read first, just an ordinary city square with oversized empty chairs scattered across it, and the absence does the emotional work that a figurative sculpture might have flattened into something more easily consumed. Visit alongside the nearby Eagle Pharmacy, the only pharmacy that remained inside the ghetto walls, now a small museum documenting its Polish owner's role helping ghetto residents. Give the square quiet, unhurried time rather than a quick photo stop, the chairs are designed to be walked among and sat with, not simply viewed from the edge.