The Galicia Museum is where pupils from this year’s eTwinning project Convoi77: Let’s Never Forget spent time researching materials for their work on the deported Jews in Convoy 77 from Drancy in France to Auschwitz.
The museum is located in Kraków’s Kazimierz district, in the heart of the city’s former Jewish quarter. The exhibition is divided into 5 parts. Each of them deals with different issues related to the Jewish community: Jewish Life in Ruins, Glimpse of the Jewish Culture that Once Was, The Holocaust – Sites of Massacre and Destruction, How the Past Is Being Remembered, and The Revival of Jewish Life.
After a tour of the exhibition and many students’ questions and the guide’s answers, it was time for the part entitled 'Ten Polish towns – ten Jewish histories’. Here we were able to learn about the biographies of ten people of Jewish origin. Delving into these stories allowed us to be transported for a moment to the times in which they lived. All the exhibitions and museum materials are also in English, so we acquired our materials in the target language of the project.
The tour guide, with the reason for our arrival in mind, gave us some valuable tips related to the eTwinning project. She enriched our knowledge about, among other things, Jewish culture at home and abroad, what life was really like for Jews before, during and after the war and much more. She also informed us where and how to look for missing information in the biographies of the deportees whose lives we are researching. We are very grateful for this lesson. Now it will definitely be easier for us – the 'LO2 detectives’ – to find information for the biographies.
We returned to the railway station through the winding streets of Kazimierz, and Professor Ksymena Nowicka-Klimczak told us about the important Jewish buildings we had passed, making our history lesson outdoors an extraordinary experience.
