A corner of a foreign field that is forever Spielberg’s: understanding the moral landscapes of the site of the former KL Płaszow,Krakoow,Poland

This essay represents the records of three different encounters with the site of the former concentration camp at Płaszow in the suburbs of the city of Krakoow in southern Poland, all written between 1993 and 1996. As the first account suggests, before the making of the film Schindler’s list by Steven Spielberg in and around Krakoow in 1993 and the subsequent worldwide success of the film, not much notice had been paid to this place among the welter of other martyrology sites linked to the German occupation of 1939-45 scattered across Poland. As the third account indicates, locals had been using this virtually anonymous place for nearly 50 years as open space in a crowded urban landscape. The second account reveals the power of Spielberg’s moral vision to appropriate that place and the Holocaust itself. The paper sets out to consider other moral landscapes that are to be found at this place, and how the various appropriations of this landscape now sit uneasily together. As Smith implies, it is not that easy to put oneself in the place of others.