The Kraków-Podgórze Detention Centre 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-centurycounty 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. 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 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 facility comprises the main building, constructed in 1905, and the adjoining parcel of land covering 3,133 square metres and surrounding the building on both sides and at the back. 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 of the significantly larger facility in the Montelupich Prison. 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, and was the place of imprisonment by the Nazis of Polish elite represented by the sculptor, Jan Krzyczkowski. It appears in the memoirs of Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the proprietor of the famous Under the Eagle Pharmacy 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. 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 for the Cracow region of the Sicherheitspolizei and of the Sicherheitsdienst, 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 who for fifteen and a half years after the Waravoided 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 as a mixed-use courthouse-cum-taxation office for the town of Podgórze 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, 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. 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, 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 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 of the Łódź Ghetto, which was located in a Łódź street of the same name at number 14/16. Like the prison discussed in the present article, the Łódź jail is frequently mentioned in the memoirs of Holocaust survivors. That facility is now defunct, and the building that housed it no longer extant.
