New Concord Square Remodelling Of The Square Of The Heroes Of The Ghetto
Seeing archival films and photos, reading memoirs of those who survived the Holocaust, we have interpreted the history of the Krakow Ghetto as a sequence of moves. On the photos you can see loaded-down people carrying boxes and furniture, pulling bigger and smaller carts. A column of young, perhaps teenage boys marches along a pavement, each of them carrying a stool over his head. A girl is going from the Pilsudski Bridge to Podgorze district. She has in her hands a chair with its backrest down and among the chair legs there is a bundle.
In 1943, after the Nazis had liquidated the Ghetto, Zgody Square was full of useless things a meaningful trace of the absence of their owners: On Zgody Square dilapidated innumerable wardrobes, tables, sideboards and other furniture have been abandoned; they have been moved from one place to another no one knows how many times now, as described by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the chemist from the Square.
We have decided to tell the story of the place using the whole interior of the Square. The remembrance of those who are no longer with us has been expressed by an accumulation of ordinary objects. Chairs, a well with a pump, rubbish bins, tram stop shelters, bicycle racks and even traffic signs, stripped of their everyday practical functions, have acquired a symbolical aspect. We have chosen patinated bronze, corroded cast iron, galvanization that becomes dull, paving blocks of grey syenite and ordinary concrete.
