The Kraków Resistance is the case of armed Jewish resistance carried out from outside the ghetto rather than from inside it. The Jewish Combat Organisation in Kraków, the Iskra group, conducted attacks on German targets in Kraków city centre in late 1942, with most of the fighters operating from hideouts on the Aryan side of the city after the partial liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto. The most successful attack was on the Cyganeria coffee house, frequented by SS officers, in December 1942. The Iskra fighters were eventually tracked down and most were killed, but their operations are part of the documentary record of armed Jewish resistance.
The setting
The Kraków Ghetto, established in March 1941 in the Podgorze district of the city, held around 20,000 Jews. The first major deportation of June 1942 sent around 6,000 Jews to Bełżec, where they were murdered. The October 1942 deportation removed another 6,000. By late 1942 the ghetto held around 8,000 people. The remaining inhabitants were a labour force for the German economy, working in factories that included Oskar Schindler’s enamelware operation.
The Jewish underground in Kraków had organised in early 1942 under the Akiva Zionist youth movement. The leadership included Adolf (Dolek) Liebeskind, Hela Schupper, Shimshon Draenger and his wife Justyna Draenger. The group decided in mid-1942 that the strategy of survival inside the ghetto was no longer viable and that armed action against the Germans was the only meaningful response. They moved most of their operations to the Aryan side of Kraków, using forged papers, and prepared attacks on German targets in the city.
The attacks
The principal Iskra operation was the attack on the Cyganeria, a coffee house in the central Kraków district frequented by SS officers and German military personnel. On the evening of 22 December 1942, Iskra fighters threw grenades into the cafe. Around twelve German military and SS personnel were killed and several more wounded. It was the largest single armed attack carried out by a Jewish underground organisation in any German-occupied city.
Iskra also attacked German military vehicles in the city, set fire to German-controlled buildings, and assassinated several individual collaborators and informers. Each operation was a small action by world standards, but each was carried out by a small group of Jewish fighters operating in plain clothes in the centre of a German-occupied city, with the certainty that capture meant immediate death.
The end of Iskra
The Gestapo investigation of the Cyganeria attack tracked the Iskra fighters over several weeks. Liebeskind was killed in a shoot-out with German police at his hideout on 24 December 1942. Other Iskra members were captured and tortured for information about the wider underground. Most were shot. The remaining Iskra fighters who escaped attempted to reach the partisan forests but were caught at various points in early 1943. Justyna Draenger was held in Montelupich prison, where she wrote a clandestine diary that survived; she was shot in November 1943.
The ghetto liquidation
The Kraków Ghetto itself was finally liquidated on 13 to 14 March 1943, after the Iskra resistance had been crushed. Around 6,000 ghetto inhabitants were sent to Auschwitz; the remaining 2,000 were sent to the Płaszów labour camp on the southern edge of Kraków. Płaszów itself, run by the SS officer Amon Goeth, was a major killing site over the next two years; around 8,000 people died there.
Schindler
The Kraków Ghetto and Płaszów camp were the setting for the rescue work of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who employed around 1,200 Jews in his enamelware factory in Kraków and his ammunition factory in Brunnlitz. Schindler’s list of essential workers, the Schindlerjuden, became famous through Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book and the 1993 Steven Spielberg film. The story is true in essentials, with the dramatic licence of the film. Schindler died in 1974 and was buried in Jerusalem at his own request. The Schindlerjuden, almost all of whom survived the war, attended his funeral in numbers.
Why the Kraków case matters
Kraków is the case of Jewish armed resistance conducted in plain clothes in an occupied city centre rather than from a defended ghetto position. The Iskra fighters had no fortified base, no walls, no large arsenal, no chance of mass civilian protection. They were small numbers of young people operating in the streets of an occupied capital, attacking SS officers in coffee houses. The military significance of their actions was modest. The historical and symbolic significance has grown with time. The Cyganeria attack is one of the few cases in the Holocaust record of Jewish fighters successfully striking the SS in a place the SS had assumed it was safe.
See also
Sources
- Anna Pioro, The Jewish Resistance in Kraków, Kraków Historical Museum, 2009
- Yael Margolin Peled, Akiva Resistance Movement in Kraków, Yad Vashem, 1985
- Justyna Draenger, Justyna’s Narrative, University of Massachusetts Press, 1996
- USHMM: Kraków