A triangular market square of plastered tenements below St Joseph's Church, and the limestone quarry where Schindler's List built its Płaszów camp set.
What Podgórze looks like
is a triangular plot that narrows toward its south end. stands there. It is neo-Gothic in red brick, built between 1905 and 1909, with a single spire and a rose window over the doors. Two former town halls flank the square, a manor called Under the White Eagle at no. 14 and a taller building at no. 1, both now offices. Three and four storey tenements plastered in ochre and grey run along the sides between them. Small shops and a green roofed flower kiosk sit at street level, with tram wires crossing overhead.
The ground climbs south toward Krzemionki hill. , an earthwork about sixteen metres high, overlooks the from there. Pale limestone walls rise straight out of the quarry floor and curve around its edge, ringed by birch scrub. Wood and metal structures from the site's own quarrying and from a film set stand mixed together among the trees.
lies a few streets north, paved flat and open. Seventy large metal chairs are spaced out across the paving. The stands on the square's south side, at the corner of Targowa Street, arched windows over a narrow storefront.
Streets off the squares keep the same plastered corners. Traugutta and Dąbrówki streets meet at a rounded building front with wrought iron balconies. A red neon Księgarnia sign still hangs lit over a shuttered corner shop on , where patches of cobblestone show through the asphalt.
Shot in Podgórze
The Liban Quarry, on the hillside above Rynek Podgórski, was Schindler's List's stand in for the Płaszów concentration camp. Krakus Mound looks straight down onto the quarry floor from the trail above it.
Schindler's List, 1993
Liban Quarry
Played the Płaszów concentration camp, Płaszów, Kraków, 1943
For Schindler's List, the production built a replica of the Płaszów concentration camp inside the quarry. Thirty four barracks and seven watchtowers went up around a road paved with false tombstones, with a reproduction of Amon Göth's villa above the quarry floor. The real Płaszów camp stood nearby and no longer exists, so the production chose the quarry rather than the original site. Street View
What Podgórze can double for
Cieszyn in Cieszyn, Silesian Voivodeship, Poland
Cieszyn's Rynek is a market square of plastered bourgeois townhouses running from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the same close, three to four storey scale as Rynek Podgórski. A parish church faces down one end of the square, the same as St Joseph's here. Its plastered ochre and grey render reads the same on camera. Cieszyn has a wooded castle hill instead of a limestone quarry, so a wide shot that climbs above the roofline gives it away. Try searching plastered market square townhouses now.
Fő tér, Óbuda's own square, is a small cobbled space closed in by ochre eighteenth century baroque houses and the old town hall. It holds a similarly intimate three storey scale to Rynek Podgórski. Its pediments and pilasters are more ornamented than the plain plastered fronts here, so it reads best for an earlier period than the nineteenth century tenements. Óbuda has no hillside or quarry behind it, and modern towers sit close enough to the square that a wide frame needs careful cropping. Try searching cobbled baroque square houses now.
