KRAKOW, Poland, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- Film director Steven Spielberg is underwriting an exhibition on the history of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow during the occupation of Poland by the Nazis.
Boguslaw Sonik, a spokesman for the Krakow City Council, said the exhibit will open this summer in a former pharmacy in the ghetto district where 17,000 Jews were forced to live from 1941 to 1943 and where thousands lost their lives when the Nazis forcibly evacuated the entire population on March 13, 1943.
Most of the survivors were sent to the Plaszow labor camp where Oskar Schindler, the subject of Spielberg's Oscar-winning 1933 film, "Schindler's List," was able to save the lives of 1,200 of them. Schindler was a Catholic manufacturer who made crockery for the German army.
Sonik said a $40,000 grant from Spielberg's Shoah Foundation is financing the exhibit.
The Krakow ghetto is a tourist attraction whose unused synagogues and ancient houses are slowly being restored.
