Plaszow Concentration Camp: What's Left, and Visiting It Respectfully

Plaszow was a German forced-labour and concentration camp built in Podgorze in 1942, on the site of two Jewish cemeteries the builders desecrated for materials. Almost nothing of it survives above ground, and one detail the film gets wrong is which villa actually belonged to the camp commandant.

What was here

At its largest the camp held more than 20,000 people at once. Krakow’s own tourism authority gives a total of about 35,000 people imprisoned there over its life, mostly Jewish, with several thousand Polish and Romani prisoners too. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people were killed on site, mostly by shooting; their bodies were later exhumed and burned by the retreating Germans in August 1944 to hide the evidence. The camp was largely razed before liberation, which is why so little is left to see: no barracks or watchtowers remain today, and part of the former grounds is now a residential estate.

Its connection to the Factory

Schindler’s own workers were partly shielded from this. He had a forced-labour subcamp of Plaszow built on his factory’s own grounds, so his resident Jewish workers had, by independent accounts, scarce contact with the camp’s guards and fared better than those who remained at Plaszow itself. Many of the people held at the main camp arrived after the ghetto in Podgorze was liquidated on 13 March 1943 — the two places are connected by the same deportations, a short distance and a few months apart.

The villa the film doesn’t show

Commandant Amon Goth’s actual home, known as the Red House, still stands at ul. Heltmana 22 — built in 1934, privately owned since 1992, and not open to visitors. Spielberg’s film used a different building as Goth’s screen residence, the Grey House on ul. Jerozolimska 3, a former SS post whose basement interrogation cell, survivors said, no one left alive. Both buildings survive; neither has a public museum interior, and sources disagree on exactly when Goth moved into the real villa — 1942 by one detailed account, September 1943 by another.

What you can see today

A 1964 monument to the camp’s victims, by the sculptor Witold Cęckiewicz, stands on the site. Since March 2024, a free, 24-hour outdoor exhibition titled “KL Plaszow: A Place After, a Place Without” has added 14 panels, 41 field markers and three archaeological viewing points in Polish, English and Hebrew along roughly an hour’s walk; the viewing points look down at surviving foundations rather than a reconstruction, a plainer kind of evidence than a panel or a monument. The KL Plaszow Memorial Site itself has run formally since January 2021, under the Museum of Krakow, with a fuller museum building still being developed. What’s here today, in other words, is a memorial landscape and an outdoor route, not an indoor exhibition.

Visiting it alongside the Factory

Plaszow is its own outing, not a stop to fold into a Factory visit on the way past. Budget 20 to 30 minutes’ travel each way by tram or taxi toward Podgorze, plus one to three hours walking the site itself. Wear comfortable shoes; there’s little shelter and few services on site. Go on a day when you’re not also trying to fit in the Factory, Auschwitz or a long walk through Kazimierz — this place asks for its own attention, not a slot wedged between two other stops. It is a memorial landscape where several thousand people were killed, and a slower, quieter visit serves it better than a rushed one.

Before you go

Plaszow has no visitor centre selling its own guided tours, and none of the products on this site are specific to it. The ghetto guide covers the walk between the two places, and who Oskar Schindler was covers the part of this history that played out at the factory itself rather than here. The homepage lines up every guided option this site covers.

Sources: USHMM, krakow.travel and plaszow.org; the villa detail from mapy.com and war-documentary.info. Checked October 2026.