Most people who come to Krakow looking for film locations are really looking for one film. Schindler's List put this city on a lot of itineraries in 1993, and thirty-odd years later the sites it used are still the most visited non-medieval things in Krakow. What nobody tells you beforehand is how much of what you will see is not where the events happened, and how much of where the events happened has nothing to see at all.
That gap is worth understanding before you set off, because it changes what you get out of the day.
Schindler's Factory is a museum about the occupation, not about the film
The enamelware factory at Ulica Lipowa 4, in the Zablocie district south of the river, is the real one. Oskar Schindler ran it, and the building survived. It is now run by the Museum of Krakow as an exhibition called Krakow under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945, and it is excellent - but go in expecting the story of the whole city under the Germans, not a shrine to the film. There are maybe two rooms that deal directly with Schindler and his workers. The rest is streets, propaganda, resistance, deportation.
Book online. This is the single most oversubscribed museum in the city and same-day tickets in July are close to fiction. Expect somewhere around 35-40 PLN for a standard adult ticket, with a free day most weeks - the museum publishes which day, and it changes, so check rather than turn up hopefully. Allow two hours minimum; the exhibition is a one-way route through reconstructed interiors and it does not let you skim.
The famous staircase and the office with the wall of pot lids are inside. The iconic exterior - the gate, the sign - is free to stand in front of, and plenty of people do exactly that and leave.
Where Spielberg actually filmed, and where the ghetto really was
Here is the thing that trips people up. The Krakow ghetto was in Podgorze (Pod-GO-zheh), on the south bank. It was not in Kazimierz. Kazimierz was the old Jewish quarter for five centuries before the war, and the Germans emptied it and moved its people across the river in 1941.
Spielberg filmed the ghetto sequences in Kazimierz anyway, because by 1993 Kazimierz still looked unrenovated and Podgorze did not. So the streets you will be shown as "the ghetto" - the run around Ulica Jozefa in particular, where the girl in the red coat walks - are Kazimierz standing in for somewhere else. Guides vary on exactly which doorway is which shot, and I would treat confident precision on that with mild suspicion.
To see the actual ghetto, cross the river to Plac Bohaterow Getta (Ghetto Heroes Square). The square is filled with oversized empty bronze chairs, a memorial to the deportations that were staged from this spot. On one corner is the Eagle Pharmacy (Apteka pod Orlem), the chemist run by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the only Pole permitted to remain inside the ghetto walls. It is small, cheap, and one of the most affecting rooms in Krakow. Fragments of the ghetto wall survive a few streets away, built in the shape of Jewish gravestones, which was not an accident.
Liban Quarry, where the camp set was built
The Plaszow camp scenes were not shot at Plaszow. Spielberg built a replica of the camp in the Liban Quarry (Kamieniolom Liban), a disused limestone quarry immediately next to the real site, and parts of that set were left behind. What survives is fragmentary and heavily overgrown - the line of fake gravestones laid as a road is the piece people go looking for - and it is being reclaimed by birch scrub a bit more every year.
Access is from Podgorze, on foot, and it is genuinely rough ground: no path lighting, no signage worth the name, loose stone, and a long drop in places. Do not go at dusk, do not go alone if you are unsure on your feet, and do not go in trainers after rain. The easiest orientation is to climb Krakus Mound (Kopiec Krakusa), the prehistoric earth mound on the hill above, which gives you a view straight down into the quarry and one of the best panoramas of Krakow going. That walk alone is worth an afternoon.
Plaszow itself, and Amon Goth's villa
The real camp site is a large, quiet expanse of rough meadow on the hill south-east of Podgorze. For decades there was almost nothing there but a monument and a lot of grass, which was disorienting for visitors who arrived expecting barracks. A dedicated memorial museum has been developed on the site in recent years, so check what is currently open before you go.
The villa the camp commandant Amon Goth occupied still stands nearby, in the Plaszow area, and it is a private residence. People do go and look at it. I would not: it is somebody's house, there is nothing to see from the street, and the local feeling about film tourists photographing it is not warm. If you want the history, the Plaszow site and the Eagle Pharmacy give it to you properly.
Polanski, Wajda and Krakow's own film history
Roman Polanski spent his childhood in Krakow and survived the ghetto here as a boy, escaping through the wire and living out the war in the countryside. The Pianist draws on that, even though the film is set in Warsaw and was shot there and in Germany. Knowing it changes how the film reads.
Andrzej Wajda, the towering figure of postwar Polish cinema, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow before he went to film school. He and his wife founded the Manggha museum of Japanese art on the south bank of the Vistula, directly across the water from Wawel - a beautiful wave-roofed building that has nothing to do with cinema and everything to do with how Wajda saw the world. It makes a good pairing with a Wawel morning.
Kazimierz has kept turning up in international productions since the 1990s, for the same reason Spielberg chose it: uneven cobbles, unrestored façades, courtyards that look like several different decades at once. If you see a street closed off with lighting rigs, that is usually what is happening.
Actually watching a film while you are here
Poland subtitles rather than dubs, so almost anything showing in a Krakow cinema that was made in English will be in English. That is a genuinely good rainy-afternoon option.
Kino Pod Baranami, in the Potocki Palace on the main square, is the arthouse cinema - small screens, good programming, a bar, and a location you cannot beat. Kino Kijow, on the west side of the centre, is the big modernist single-screen survivor and hosts festival screenings. Tickets across the city run roughly 25-40 PLN, which after London prices feels like an error.
The Krakow Film Festival, one of the oldest documentary and short-film festivals in Europe, takes over the city for a week in late spring. If your dates overlap, screenings are cheap and many are subtitled in English. Check the current programme dates rather than trusting a fixed week.
Doing all of it in one day
A workable order: Schindler's Factory first thing on a pre-booked slot, then walk fifteen minutes west to Plac Bohaterow Getta and the Eagle Pharmacy, then up to Krakus Mound and a look into the quarry, then back over the footbridge into Kazimierz for the Ulica Jozefa walk in the late afternoon light. That is six or seven hours with lunch, all of it on foot apart from the option of a tram back.
One practical tip that matters more than any of the above: do not stack Schindler's Factory and a day at Auschwitz-Birkenau together. People do it, and by mid-afternoon of the second one they have stopped taking anything in. Put a normal day between them - Wawel, a long lunch, the salt mine, anything. The material deserves you being able to absorb it.
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