Plac Bohaterów Getta Kraków

Plac Bohaterów Getta in Kraków is a square in the Podgórze district, also known as Ghetto Heroes Square. It stands in the heart of the former Kraków Ghetto and is one of the city's Holocaust memorials.

The square has carried several names. Its first name translates as Small Market Square, its second as Square of Concord, and its current name translates as Heroes of the Ghetto Square.

What is Plac Bohaterów Getta in Kraków?

Plac Bohaterów Getta is both a public square and a memorial site connected directly to the history of the Kraków Ghetto. Its location in Podgórze places it within the small, walled district where more than 15,000 Jewish people were enclosed after the ghetto was established by Nazi occupiers in March 1941.

What happened at Plac Bohaterów Getta?

From March 1941 to March 1943, Plac Bohaterów Getta was a central point for the forced deportation of Jewish residents. Families were summoned to the square by loudspeakers and arrived carrying their belongings before being herded onto waiting trains.

Those deportations led to extermination camps including Bełżec, Płaszów, and Auschwitz. The square's significance comes from this specific role: it was a place where people were gathered and removed from the ghetto, rather than simply a site associated with the wider history of Kraków during the Second World War.

What do the chairs at Plac Bohaterów Getta represent?

Plac Bohaterów Getta contains 68 bronze chairs, an installation created by architects Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Łatak and unveiled in 2005. Each chair represents a thousand lives lost.

The empty chairs symbolize the absence of the people who never returned. Their arrangement is part of the memorial's meaning: instead of forming one compact monument, the chairs are scattered across the square and face different directions. This dispersed pattern evokes the confusion and disarray of the deportations that took place here.

How can you look at the square as you visit?

Read the chairs as a deliberately dispersed installation, not as a single monument gathered in one place. Their empty arrangement connects the physical square with its documented history of forced gathering and deportation: the memorial marks absence across the same public space where families were once summoned with their belongings.

Plac Bohaterów Getta is stop 5 of 9 on the Krakow Jewish Metamorphosis Tour, which offers context for the square while you walk through this part of Kraków.