Status open Closed in operation | Security class minimum Capacity 207 | |
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Opened built in 1905 as County Court Managed by Polish Administration of Prisons (Służba Więzienna), Ministry of Justice (Poland)In World War II: KdS Krakau (Kommandeur or commander for the Cracow region (Distrikt Krakau) of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) and of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) (1944–1945) | ||
The Kraków-Podgórze Detention Centre (Polish: Areszt Śledczy Kraków Podgórze) is a correctional facility located at ul. Stefana Czarnieckiego 3 in Kraków, Poland, in the municipal district of Podgórze. Originally, it was a turn-of-the-century County Court and revenue service, built in 1905, from design by Ferdynand Liebling. At present, it is a community branch of Detention Centre Kraków, with main building located at ul. Montelupich 7 street. The Kraków-Podgórze Detention Centre specializes in drug-and-alcohol-addiction therapy and serves also as a temporary arrest facility. It was created in 1971 as a prison for men with the holding capacity of 207. It was made into a detention facility in 1990. There's a medical clinic and a dentist on-site. Prisoners who completed the recovery program work with mentally and physically disabled clients.
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During World War II, it was a Nazi German prison, a place of secret detention and torture of Polish members of the Resistance, Armia Krajowa. It is memorialized as a notorious site of martyrdom during the German occupation of Poland. The prison facility had a Gestapo station attached to it.
The prison was initially incorporated within the borders of the Kraków Ghetto when that district was created by the Nazis in March 1941; however, in the redistricting of June 1942 (following mass deportations of the Ghetto population) the whole street was placed outside the confines of the Ghetto.
Overview
In Polish literature, the prison is commonly referred to simply as więzienie przy ulicy Czarnieckiego ("the prison in Czarniecki Street"). The facility comprises the main building, constructed in 1905 (since 1996 listed in the register of historical monuments), and the adjoining parcel of land covering 3,133 square metres and surrounding the building on both sides and at the back (bounded on the south by the ulica Rękawka). The grounds were used by the Nazis as execution grounds during the Second World War which ended here with the liberation of Cracow on 18 January 1945. The facility was used by the Nazis as a de facto subsidiary (Zweiganstalt) of the significantly larger facility in the ulica Montelupich. Among the numerous victims murdered here is counted the Polish poet, Zuzanna Ginczanka. The prison is mentioned in the diaries of Holocaust survivors, such as Stanisław Taubenschlag (b. 1920; the son of Rafał Taubenschlag), and was the place of imprisonment by the Nazis of Polish elite represented by the sculptor, Jan Krzyczkowski (1910–1980). It appears in the memoirs of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the proprietor of the famous "Under the Eagle" pharmacy (Apteka Pod Orłem) nearby, featured in the award-winning film, Schindler's List. The various methods of torture used by the Nazis against the detainees included an early form of waterboarding performed in a bathtub full of water, which close family members of the victims specially brought to the prison for the occasion were made to witness as an added terror tactic (e.g., in the case of Józef Świstak nom de guerre Bunkier, a member of the Szare Szeregi, d. 1944, whose mother was made to witness his martyrdom). The prison was a military target in the attempts by the Armia Krajowa to free prisoners incarcerated there. Most of those imprisoned at Czarnieckiego 3 could not be helped.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, the total number of prisoners averaged at 150 at any one time: for example, the records for 25 May 1942 show a total of 165. On another occasion during the War, there were just 59 prisoners, including 5 women. Resistance movement was active within the prison, and prisoners had access to clandestine literature of the underground, while inside information on the prison was being secretly sent out to the Polish government-in-exile. On 3 February 1944 the prison was placed under the authority of the commander (Kommandeur) for the Cracow region (Distrikt Krakau) of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) and of the Sicherheitsdienst (Intelligence Service), at which time the existing prisoners were transferred to alternative locations. The post of the Kommandeur of these two services was occupied from September 1943 until the end of the Nazi rule in Cracow on 17 January 1945 by Rudolf Batz (1903–1961) — who for fifteen and a half years after the War (until November 1960) avoided capture by living under an assumed identity.
After the War, the facility continued to be used by the communist authorities of Poland for detention of political prisoners in the Soviet-backed struggle for control over the Polish nation: in March 1946 the prison housed 275 inmates.
Physical structure
The building — not intended for prison use — was originally designed by the Polish architect Ferdynand Liebling (1877–1942) as a mixed-use courthouse-cum-taxation office for the town of Podgórze (Ger., Josefsstadt) and constructed in 1905 when the area was under Austrian occupation. The date of the establishment of prison facilities on the premises is unknown. Podgórze, originally a separate town, was incorporated into the municipality of Cracow by a decision of the Podgórze city council in 1915. Wartime records, including the memoirs of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, indicate that a court was still functional here in Nazi times of the Second World War, at least nominally (the prison being the chief feature), while communist-era press reports cite an operational circuit court together with the prison on the premises in post-War years, suggesting a conversion to an all-prison use in 1971 when the court ceased operations. The prison administration quarters housed in the post-War years an office of the District Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes (Okręgowa Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich, a defunct governmental body now subsumed within the IPN whose purview includes Communist in addition to Nazi crimes).
During the Third Republic, on 22 May 1996, the prison complex was entered on the register of historical monuments protected by law, a fact further confirmed by an additional resolution of the City Council of 28 June 2006.
Current status
Despite being recognized as both a historical monument and a place of martyrdom, the facility continues to be operated to this day as a combination of remand prison and ordinary correctional facility by the Polish Prison Administration (the Służba Więzienna), a unit of the Polish Justice Ministry. Its current official name is Areszt Śledczy Kraków Podgórze. One of its former names was Zakład Karny Kraków-Podgórze. Prisoner-letters draw attention to overcrowding, and two suicides in one year.
Materials pertaining to crimes against humanity committed at Czarnieckiego 3 during the Second World War are preserved at the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and at other archives in Poland (listed in part in Obozy hitlerowskie na ziemiach polskich 1939–1945: informator encyklopedyczny; see Bibliography) and at the Bad Arolsen Archives in Germany.
Disambiguation
The Czarnieckiego Prison in the Cracow district of Podgórze is not to be confused with the central prison (Zentral-Gefängnis) of the Łódź Ghetto (Ghetto Litzmannstadt), which was (historically) located in a Łódź street of the same name (the ul. Czarnieckiego) at number 14/16 (street renamed Schneidergasse by the Nazis, and the building indicated at number 12). Like the prison discussed in the present article, the Łódź jail is frequently mentioned in the memoirs of Holocaust survivors (for example, by Holocaust witness Sara Zyskind (1927–1994), who speaks about "the prison on Czarniecki Street"). That facility is now defunct, and the building that housed it no longer extant.