DEEP into the bowels of the earth we descended, more than 400 steps with hundreds more to go. In that cold, damp space between gray walls, we moved from one compartment to the next, the eerie sound of wind coming through heavy wooden doors.
The Wieliczka Salt Mine is 327 meters deep (taller than the Eiffel Tower), and its underground maze of corridors stretches 200 miles. But that’s not the reason this mine outside the city of Krakow has drawn tourists for two centuries.
The miners there did more than just take salt from the rock. They also carved statues, reliefs and whole chapels out of the rock salt.
Additionally, our guide, Lydia, said the air in the mine was so good for the respiratory system that “if you spend two hours in the mine, you will look 10 years younger.”
So my sisters and I were devastated when, returning to the surface, we found that our travel companions still recognized us.
Krakow is Poland’s second largest city.
Once Poland’s capital, it hosts the Wawel Royal Castle, the residence of Poland’s kings until the 1600s. This is now a museum housing Renaissance paintings, sculptures, tapestries, armor and other period pieces, none of which we saw since our bus only drove by the castle.
What we entered instead was Krakow’s historic Kazimierz district, where Jews lived peacefully alongside Christians for 600 years until World War 2 intruded.
The Jewish section of Kazimierz features quaint restaurants and cafes, between which stood a modest two-level green building on Szeroka Street that Lydia said was the house of Helena Rubinstein.
The daughter of a Polish-Jewish shopkeeper, Helena migrated penniless to Australia from Poland in 1902. But she traded on her alabaster skin and women’s insecurities to found an international cosmetics empire that made her very wealthy.
On Szeroka also sit two historic synagogues. The Old Synagogue was the main religious and community center of the city’s Jewish population for 500 years until Germany invaded Poland in 1939. It was made to resemble a fortress so it could withstand a siege.
Another synagogue, the Remah Synagogue, remains active nearly half a millennium since rising beside a Jewish cemetery in 1557.
Schindler’s factory
In 1941, Kazimierz was emptied of its Jews when occupying German forces created a ghetto nearby where it crowded 17,000 Jews into 320 buildings. “The ghetto ended after two years when the Jews began to be sent to death camps,” Lydia said.
Not all the Jews died, though, because German industrialist Oskar Schindler, immortalized in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List,” saved 1,200 of them by employing them.
An opportunist, he employed Jews because they were cheaper than other Poles, Lydia said of Schindler, whose factory we were now standing in front of. But as he got wind of Jews being sent to concentration and death camps, the certainty of their fate there appalled him. So he used connections and bribes to Nazi officials to keep his workers safe, losing his fortune in the process.
The factory, which made enameled kitchen pots and munitions for the German army, is now a museum on life in Krakow under Nazi occupation and on the life of Schindler himself.
Old Town
Just minutes away from the factory is Krakow’s Old Town, where the splendid 400-year-old Church of Saints Peter and Paul accentuated by limestone sculptures of the apostles mounted on pedestals in front of the church wowed.
We soon reached the Old Market Square dating back to 1250, the central feature of which was the Cloth Hall, a Renaissance-era shopping center. From the fifth to the 17th centuries, European towns built cloth halls in their main marketplaces for the trading of goods like cloth, leather, salt and spices.
St. Mary’s Church adjacent to the Market Square is a brick Gothic style church famed for its 15th century wooden main altar containing 200 wooden figures depicting events of the New Testament. The center panel depicts the Assumption of Mary.
The wood carvings are so realistic that they even show the skin diseases of the models the sculptor Veit Stoss used for his figures. Doctors examining the sculptures years later determined that what his models had was eczema.
Desecration
The great pains Krakow takes to preserve its medieval churches contrast sharply with the lack of care the Philippines gives to its old churches.
I recall with amusement the outrage that the people of Argao town in southern Cebu directed at their parish priest in 2003, for his misguided effort to beautify their 215-year-old church by having the antique altar and saint statues painted over a garish gold.
Heritage conservationists died a thousand deaths with this single inane act, calling it a “desecration” that erased “more than 100 years of history” in an instance.
Krakow shows us how to preserve the vestiges of the past, but first to see them for what they are—an inheritance for handing down to future generations, not objects for discarding or reshaping on a whim.