Poland - Eastern Europe - page 417

Kraków served as the seat of the Polish kingdom (it only lost out to the usurper War-
saw in 1596 after the union with Lithuania made the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom so
large that it became difficult for distant noblemen to travel here).
Kraków started to decline around this time. Following the Polish partitions at the
end of the 18th century, Kraków eventually fell under the domination of Austria-
Hungary, and was ruled from Vienna. It became the main city in the new Austrian
province of Galicia, but had to share some of the administrative duties with the east-
ern city of Lwów (which must have quite a climb down for a former Polish capital!).
Viennese rule proved to be a boon in its own right. The Habsburgs were far more
liberal in their views than either the Prussians or czarist Russia, and the relative toler-
ance here fostered a Polish cultural renaissance that lasted well into the 20th century.
Kraków was the base of the late-19th and early-20th-century M l oda Polska (Young
Poland) movement, a revival of literature, art, and architecture (often likened to “Art
Nouveau”) that is still fondly remembered to this day.
Kraków had traditionally been viewed as a haven for Jews ever since the 14th cen-
tury when King Kazimierz first opened Poland to Jewish settlement. The Kraków dis-
trict named for the king, Kazimierz, began life as a separate Polish town, but through
the centuries slowly acquired the characteristics of a traditional Jewish quarter. By the
19th and early 20th centuries Kazimierz was one of the leading Jewish settlements in
central Europe, lending Kraków a unique dimension as a center of both Catholic and
Jewish scholarship.
World War II drastically altered the city and for all intents and purposes ended this
Jewish cultural legacy. The Nazis made Kraków the nominal capital of their rump Pol-
ish state: the “General Gouvernement.” The Nazi governor, and later war criminal,
Hans Frank, ruled brutally from atop Wawel Castle. One of the first Nazi atrocities
was to arrest and eventually execute the Polish faculty of Jagellonian University. Not
long after the start of the war, the Nazis expelled the Jews from Kazimierz, first plac-
ing them in a confined ghetto space at Podgórze, about a mile south of Kazimierz, and
later deporting nearly all of them to death camps. (As a historical aside: Frank was
prosecuted at the Nuremburg trials and executed in 1946.)
Kraków luckily escaped destruction at the end of the war, but fared poorly in the
postwar decades under the Communist leadership. The Communists never liked the
city, probably because of its royal roots and intellectual and Catholic pretensions. For
whatever reason they decided to place their biggest postwar industrial project, the
enormous Nowa Huta steelworks, just a couple of miles upwind from the Old Town.
Many argue the intention was to win over the skeptical Kraków intellectuals to the
Communist side, but the noise, dirt, and smoke from the mills, not surprisingly, had
the opposite effect. The new workers were slow to embrace Communism, and during
those wretched days of the 1970s, when a series of food price hikes galvanized work-
ers around the country, the city was suddenly transformed into a hotbed of anti-Com-
munist activism.
Kraków will be forever linked with its most famous favorite son, Pope John Paul II.
The pope, Karol Woyty l a, was born not far from Kraków, in the town of Wadowice,
and rose up through the church hierarchy here, serving for many years as the arch-
bishop of the Kraków diocese before being elevated to pope in 1978. If Gda ^ sk and
the Solidarity trade union provided the industrial might of the anti-Communist
movement, then Kraków and Pope John Paul II were the movement's spiritual heart.