Jewish community cemetery in Podgórze on the grounds of the KL Plaszow memorial site. Photo: K. Bednarczyk 2021 (MKLP)
What will happen in the near future, and when will the KL Plaszow Memorial be built in its final form?
Currently, our activities consist of two elements: conducting and completing investments and statutory activities. The KL Plaszow Museum was established in January this year, and in line with the investment schedule, the process of its creation is to take five years. We hope it will be feasible to keep to the assumptions of the schedule, although some of the decisions were made before the pandemic. We are aware that a lot has changed recently. However, funds are in place for both investment and day-to-day operations. We now have nine employees and a sense that we are slowly building a committed team that understands the subject. The museum’s creation will be a multi-year process, but we are on the right track in our perspective.
What activities are you currently focusing on?
We were founded during the pandemic, so our activity has been bipartite from the beginning – activities carried out live and in the virtual space. We have started and are carrying out a series of online meetings called “Let's talk. Regular meetings in KL Plaszow Museum”. Our main goal is to show that the memorial space deserves respect because it is a cemetery. We continue to organise guided tours of the site, and a significant portion of these activities involves working with school students from the Podgórze district of Cracow. They are our closest neighbours. We were also looking for a solution that would permit a one-off commemoration of this space. One problem we had was that no date in the camp’s history would be shared by different groups. So, we focused on the process. We organised a meeting – because it was intentionally not a ceremony with official guests – which we called “Memory – Zachor”. The double name, Polish and Hebrew, refers to two groups of prisoners, Poles and Jews. During the meeting, we read the accounts of the survivors. We did it in August because that was when the six-month process of liquidating the camp began.