Pomorska Street

What to expect

The reason to come here is in the basement. Three rooms of the former Gestapo detention block survive, and so do the inscriptions that prisoners scratched into their walls between 1943 and 1945 - the dark-tourism.com guide counts around four hundred of them. Some are farewell messages left by people who knew they would be shot. The cells hold the status of a national memorial site, and they, not the display cases, are what you carry out of the building.

The rest of the house explains how it happened. The Silesian House is a 1930s modernist block built by a Polish association campaigning for the country’s western borderlands, with a cinema, a library and a student hostel. On 13 September 1939, days after the Wehrmacht entered Krakow, German police formations took it over. Until January 1945 it served as the security police headquarters for the Krakow district: interrogation rooms on the first and second floors, the holding cells below.

The permanent exhibition, “People of Krakow in Times of Terror 1939-1945-1956”, runs in three parts - the building’s own story, the victims of German terror during the occupation, and the years 1945-1956 under communist rule. That third part is the one Schindler’s Factory does not tell, and for most foreign visitors it is the genuinely new material. Documents, family keepsakes, recorded witness accounts and a reconstructed interrogation room carry the narrative.

The branch also keeps an archive of victims of terror: a database of several thousand biographical records covering both occupations, consultable on site and online. If you are tracing a family name in Krakow, this is where to start.

Be straight with yourself about the fit. This is a memorial to torture and execution, suitable for adults and for teenagers from roughly 14, and not for small children. The cells are cramped and reached by narrow stairs, which matters if you are claustrophobic.

Tips

• Allow 45 to 90 minutes. The branch is small but text-heavy; the spread depends entirely on how much of it you read. One reviewer spent 90 minutes and still called the place small.
• Do not skip the cells. Without them this is a solid history exhibition; with them it is the visit you remember.
• Labels: a visitor guide that went through the whole display reports that texts and captions are bilingual, Polish with good English translations - the museum does not state this on its own site, so treat it as a traveller’s report rather than a guarantee. The prisoners’ inscriptions themselves are in Polish and Latin, with explanations alongside.
• Wednesday is free, with tickets released at bilety.muzeumkrakowa.pl or at the desk while places last. On any other day just turn up: there is no queue here.
• Last admission is 16:30, which leaves you half an hour. Arrive by 15:45 if you want the visit unhurried.
• Skip it if Schindler’s Factory and the Eagle Pharmacy are already on today’s list. Three stops on the same Memory Trail in one afternoon is too much - give Pomorska Street its own slot.
• Accessibility is limited: no lift, stairs and level changes inside, narrow steps down to the cells, and no accessible toilet. Assistance dogs are welcome; a visit with a sign-language interpreter has to be arranged in advance.
• Groups: a guided tour of the permanent exhibition costs 280 PLN per group plus admission, booked with the branch.

Getting there

On foot: about 20 minutes from the Main Market Square along Karmelicka street, heading for plac Inwalidów. By tram: the Plac Inwalidów stop, two stops from the centre, served by lines running along the Aleje Trzech Wieszczów ring road and Królewska street. The entrance is on Pomorska street, not on Królewska. There is no museum car park and the surrounding streets are paid parking.

Nearby

The Eagle Pharmacy is the second stop on the Memory Trail: the same occupation seen from the ghetto square in Podgórze. Schindler’s Factory tells the story at the largest scale and with the largest crowds - the sensible order is Pomorska Street first, the factory on another day. The Home Army Museum covers the Polish underground state, which is precisely what the Gestapo in this building existed to destroy.

Background

The Silesian House was paid for with money raised during the plebiscite campaign in Upper Silesia, on land the city handed over free of charge. Józef Rybicki drew the design in 1931 and the building went up between 1932 and 1937 under Ludwik Wojtyczko’s supervision. After the war it passed to a state defence league, and the old cinema hall ran as the Wolność cinema until 1994. A plaque to the Gestapo’s victims was unveiled in 1975; the building entered the heritage register on 9 December 1997. The museum branch has occupied it since 1981, and the current permanent exhibition opened on 3 June 2011. Every September since 2007 the branch hosts the Days of Remembrance for Victims of the Gestapo, marking the anniversary of the German takeover.