Worn plaster tenements line Szeroka Street and Plac Nowy, and Schindler's List used the square as the ghetto's Plac Zgody.
What Kazimierz looks like
widens into a long rectangular square rather than staying street width, worn plaster tenements in ochre, pink and mint green running down both long sides. At the north end the stands behind thick masonry walls and small round headed windows, its stepped gables and heavy stone buttresses left plain against the tenement fronts beside it.
The Remah Synagogue and its cemetery sit at the square's south end behind a high stone wall, an arched gateway with iron gates the only break in it. Cars park along the cobblestones out front. The tenements opposite carry the same patched, uneven plaster as the rest of the street, with dormered roofs breaking the skyline above them.
A short walk away, is built around a round market hall in the middle of an open square, stalls and food windows around its base and low tenements ringing the pavement with ground floor shops and bars behind roll down shutters. Józefa Street runs off toward it, arched passage entrances leading back through the buildings to inner courtyards ringed by iron balconies and stacked windows.
Two to four storeys is the norm across the surrounding grid, plaster patched rather than restored on most facades and the pavement cobblestone throughout. , one block over, narrows to barely a car's width between the building fronts.
Shot in Kazimierz
For Schindler's List, the production used Szeroka Street as the ghetto's main square, with the memorial gate the crew built standing beside the in the background of the crowd scenes. Kraków's own Jewish quarter stood in for itself elsewhere in the film too. Stern and a group of older men walk toward the square on Na Przejściu, and a boy helps hide a Jewish mother from Nazi officers in a courtyard at . Poldek Pfefferberg runs into Amon Göth on Ciemna Street during the ghetto's clearing.
Schindler's List, 1993
Szeroka Street
Played Plac Zgody, the ghetto's main square, Podgórze, Kraków, 1943
Extras lined up along this stretch of Szeroka Street for the forced labor sign up scene, and the Nazis return to the same street to clear the ghetto later in the film. The memorial gate the production built stood beside the Wolf Popper Synagogue, visible in the background of the wider shots. Street View
What Kazimierz can double for
Whitechapel in Tower Hamlets, Greater London, United Kingdom
Whitechapel's narrow lanes and market stalls carry the same close, working scale as the streets around Plac Nowy. Wentworth Street and Brick Lane still run market stalls the way Plac Nowy does. The brick there is red and yellow stock rather than plaster, and double decker buses and modern shopfronts need dressing out of any wide shot. Try searching market stalls now.
The Lower East Side's tenements over ground floor shops match the same scale and use as the streets around Szeroka, both built for a working immigrant Jewish quarter. Orchard Street and Ludlow Street carry the same close spacing and repeated storefronts. The tenements there are red and brown brick rather than plaster, and fire escapes on the facades are a New York detail absent here. Try searching tenements ground floor shops now.
Josefov is also a former Jewish quarter, but its buildings are grand Art Nouveau apartment houses rather than the low worn tenements standing here. The scale reads larger and more ornate wherever the facades face Pařížská, its wide central boulevard. Its side streets nearer the river keep a tighter, plainer scale, closer to the worn tenements a location scout is usually after. Try searching grand Art Nouveau apartment houses now.
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