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95-428: The Wieliczka Salt Mine ( Polish : Kopalnia soli Wieliczka ) is a salt mine in the town of Wieliczka , near Kraków in southern Poland . From Neolithic times, sodium chloride ( table salt ) was produced there from the upwelling brine . The Wieliczka salt mine , excavated from the 13th century, produced table salt continuously until 1996, as one of the world's oldest operating salt mines. Throughout its history,

190-499: A / (spelled a ), / ɔ / (spelled o ) and / u / (spelled u and ó as separate letters). The nasal vowels are / ɛ w̃ / (spelled ę ) and / ɔ w̃ / (spelled ą ). Unlike Czech or Slovak, Polish does not retain phonemic vowel length — the letter ó , which formerly represented lengthened /ɔː/ in older forms of the language, is now vestigial and instead corresponds to /u/. The Polish consonant system shows more complexity: its characteristic features include

285-427: A better chance at being put on the list for transport. During July and August 1944, a number of transports of prisoners left KL Płaszow for Auschwitz , Stutthof , Flossenburg , Mauthausen , and other camps. In January 1945, the last of the remaining inmates and camp staff left the camp on a death march to Auschwitz. Several female SS guards were part of the group that accompanied them. Many of those who survived

380-729: A compilation of film music by Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner , was recorded by Sinfonia Varsovia in the Wieliczka mine's chapel. The chapel is often said to have the best acoustics in Europe. in 1999 in the US the mine was featured in a Modern Marvels episode on salt mines . In the Australia television series Spellbinder: Land of the Dragon Lord , the mines were used as the Land of

475-771: A dialect of Polish. Many Silesians consider themselves a separate ethnicity and have been advocating for the recognition of Silesian as a regional language in Poland . The law recognizing it as such was passed by the Sejm and Senate in April 2024, but has been vetoed by President Andrzej Duda in late May of 2024. According to the last official census in Poland in 2011, over half a million people declared Silesian as their native language. Many sociolinguists (e.g. Tomasz Kamusella , Agnieszka Pianka, Alfred F. Majewicz, Tomasz Wicherkiewicz ) assume that extralinguistic criteria decide whether

570-669: A few culturally and linguistically related tribes from the basins of the Vistula and Oder before eventually accepting baptism in 966. With Western Christianity , Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet , which made it possible to write down Polish, which until then had existed only as a spoken language . The closest relatives of Polish are the Elbe and Baltic Sea Lechitic dialects ( Polabian and Pomeranian varieties). All of them, except Kashubian , are extinct. The precursor to modern Polish

665-399: A further subdivision between Jews and non-Jews. Although separated, men and women still managed to have contact with one another. There was also a private barracks for the camp's Jewish police and their families. While the primary function of the camp was forced labor, the camp was also the site of mass murder of inmates as well as prisoners brought in from the outside. The main targets were

760-494: A key figure. While prisoners always feared a transport to Auschwitz, one that was always sought after was a transport to Brünnlitz labor camp in Czechoslovakia. This is where Oskar Schindler's enamel factory was located. Schindler was known for being compassionate towards Jews. He never hit anyone, was always kind, and smiled frequently around the workers. Having relatives and friends that worked for Schindler gave one

855-520: A large number of branches in all of these areas) offers services available in Polish at all of their cash machines in addition to English and Spanish . According to the 2011 census there are now over 500,000 people in England and Wales who consider Polish to be their "main" language. In Canada , there is a significant Polish Canadian population : There are 242,885 speakers of Polish according to

950-543: A lect is an independent language or a dialect: speakers of the speech variety or/and political decisions, and this is dynamic (i.e. it changes over time). Also, research organizations such as SIL International and resources for the academic field of linguistics such as Ethnologue , Linguist List and others, for example the Ministry of Administration and Digitization recognized the Silesian language. In July 2007,

1045-454: A nasal consonant, rather than a nasal vowel. For example, ą in dąb ("oak") is pronounced [ɔm] , and ę in tęcza ("rainbow") is pronounced [ɛn] (the nasal assimilates to the following consonant). When followed by l or ł (for example przyjęli , przyjęły ), ę is pronounced as just e . When ę is at the end of the word it is often pronounced as just [ɛ] . Depending on

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1140-574: A new shipment of inmates, he would set up deportations for Auschwitz . On 14 May 1944 Göth ordered all children to be sent to the "kindergarten". This turned out only to be a precursor to deportation to Auschwitz on 15 May where the children were all gassed. Göth entrusted documents pertaining to the mass killings and executions to a high ranking female member of the SS, Kommandoführerin Alice Orlowski . She held these documents in her possession until

1235-584: A prisoner tried to escape the camp, Göth shot 10 prisoners as a punishment. Göth would also release his Great Danes on prisoners if he did not like their expressions. He oversaw a staff that was mostly non-German. It consisted of 206 Ukrainian SS personnel from the Trawniki , 600 Germans of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (1943–1944), and a few SS women, including Gertrud Heise , Luise Danz and Alice Orlowski . The female guards treated

1330-422: A pyre to obliterate the evidence of the mass murder. Witnesses later testified that 17 truckloads of human ashes were removed from the burning site and scattered over the area. Although food was scarce, inmates that possessed any number of zlotys could buy extra food. A food for food trading system also developed. For example, two portions of soup was equal to a half loaf of bread. When Göth received notice of

1425-402: A reversed diacritic hook called an ogonek . Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases . It has fixed penultimate stress and an abundance of palatal consonants . Contemporary Polish developed in the 1700s as the successor to the medieval Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries). Among the major languages, it

1520-491: A single word. This applies in particular to many combinations of preposition plus a personal pronoun, such as do niej ('to her'), na nas ('on us'), prze ze mnie ('because of me'), all stressed on the bolded syllable. The Polish alphabet derives from the Latin script but includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics . The Polish alphabet was one of three major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Western and some South Slavic languages,

1615-514: A standard punishment, twenty-five lashings were dealt to the guilty inmate's buttocks. While prisoners' daily lives were dominated by fear and starvation, there were some outlets for hope of survival. Rumors involving the Russian advancement that would lead to the camp's liberation always circulated. Oskar Schindler , a member of the Nazi Party who saved the 1,200 Schindlerjuden , was also

1710-501: A stone quarry. Most of the prisoners were Polish Jews . There were also high numbers of women and children compared with other camps. A large degree of the Hungarian prisoners were women. The death rate in the camp was very high. Many prisoners died of typhus , starvation, and from executions. Because the work facilities were designed for men, the women had a lower chance of survival. Płaszów camp became particularly infamous for both

1805-416: A variety of actions. Any action perceived as sabotage, such as smuggling items into the camp, disobeying orders, or carrying an extra piece of food in one's clothes was an offense punishable by death. Prisoners were warned that if they tried to escape, every member of their family and even innocent strangers would be killed. In terms of methods for killing, death by hanging was a favored method of Göth's. For

1900-405: A verse by Jan Brzechwa ) is W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie [fʂt͡ʂɛbʐɛˈʂɨɲɛ ˈxʂɔw̃ʂt͡ʂ ˈbʐmi fˈtʂt͡ɕiɲɛ] ('In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed'). Unlike languages such as Czech, Polish does not have syllabic consonants – the nucleus of a syllable is always a vowel. The consonant /j/ is restricted to positions adjacent to a vowel. It also cannot precede

1995-478: A vowel when it precedes another vowel (it represents /j/ , palatalization of the preceding consonant, or both depending on analysis). Also the letters u and i sometimes represent only semivowels when they follow another vowel, as in autor /ˈawtɔr/ ('author'), mostly in loanwords (so not in native nauka /naˈu.ka/ 'science, the act of learning', for example, nor in nativized Mateusz /maˈte.uʂ/ 'Matthew'). Some loanwords , particularly from

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2090-711: Is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group within the Indo-European language family written in the Latin script . It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union . Polish

2185-625: Is a space for sound and light show with the music of Frédéric Chopin. Tourists can set off to the Museum Route after sightseeing the Tourist Route. The Museum Route is famous for its unique on the European scale collection of the horse mills, exhibition of salt crystals and monumental chambers such as Maria Teresa and Saurau Chamber. The Museum Route is located entirely on the 3 level of the mine and it takes around 50 minutes to go through

2280-419: Is also spoken as a second language in eastern Germany , northern Czech Republic and Slovakia , western parts of Belarus and Ukraine as well as in southeast Lithuania and Latvia . Because of the emigration from Poland during different time periods, most notably after World War II , millions of Polish speakers can also be found in countries such as Canada , Argentina , Brazil , Israel , Australia ,

2375-427: Is most closely related to Slovak and Czech but differs in terms of pronunciation and general grammar. Additionally, Polish was profoundly influenced by Latin and other Romance languages like Italian and French as well as Germanic languages (most notably German ), which contributed to a large number of loanwords and similar grammatical structures. Extensive usage of nonstandard dialects has also shaped

2470-447: Is possible to say ko goście zoba czy li? – here kogo retains its usual stress (first syllable) in spite of the attachment of the clitic. Reanalysis of the endings as inflections when attached to verbs causes the different colloquial stress patterns. These stress patterns are considered part of a "usable" norm of standard Polish - in contrast to the "model" ("high") norm. Some common word combinations are stressed as if they were

2565-595: Is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics , and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions ( ą , ć , ę , ł , ń , ó , ś , ź , ż ) to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet , while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set comprises 23 consonants and 9 written vowels , including two nasal vowels ( ę , ą ) defined by

2660-524: Is the Old Polish language . Ultimately, Polish descends from the unattested Proto-Slavic language. The Book of Henryków (Polish: Księga henrykowska , Latin : Liber fundationis claustri Sanctae Mariae Virginis in Heinrichau ), contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai (in modern orthography: Daj, uć ja pobrusza, a ti pocziwaj ;

2755-529: Is the most widely-used minority language in Lithuania's Vilnius County , by 26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results, as Vilnius was part of Poland from 1922 until 1939. Polish is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania. In Ukraine, it is most common in the western parts of Lviv and Volyn Oblasts , while in West Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority, especially in

2850-430: The kropka (superior dot) over the letter ż , and the ogonek ("little tail") under the letters ą, ę . The letters q, v, x are used only in foreign words and names. Polish orthography is largely phonemic —there is a consistent correspondence between letters (or digraphs and trigraphs ) and phonemes (for exceptions see below). The letters of the alphabet and their normal phonemic values are listed in

2945-401: The ś in święty ("holy") all represent the sound / ɕ / . The exceptions to the above rule are certain loanwords from Latin, Italian, French, Russian or English—where s before i is pronounced as s , e.g. sinus , sinologia , do re mi fa sol la si do , Saint-Simon i saint-simoniści , Sierioża , Siergiej , Singapur , singiel . In other loanwords

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3040-596: The Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border. There are significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and their descendants in many other countries. In the United States , Polish Americans number more than 11 million but most of them cannot speak Polish fluently. According to the 2000 United States Census , 667,414 Americans of age five years and over reported Polish as

3135-488: The Moloch . The mine has appeared on multiple editions of the reality show The Amazing Race including Velyki Perehony , HaMerotz LaMillion 2 , The Amazing Race Australia 1 , and The Amazing Race 27 . Polish language Polish ( endonym : język polski , [ˈjɛ̃zɘk ˈpɔlskʲi] , polszczyzna [pɔlˈʂt͡ʂɘzna] or simply polski , [ˈpɔlskʲi] )

3230-666: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth 's influence gave Polish the status of lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe . The process of standardization began in the 14th century and solidified in the 16th century during the Middle Polish era. Standard Polish was based on various dialectal features, with the Greater Poland dialect group serving as the base. After World War II , Standard Polish became

3325-522: The United Kingdom and the United States . Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century, the process largely triggered by the establishment and development of the Polish state. At the time, it was a collection of dialect groups with some mutual features, but much regional variation was present. Mieszko I , ruler of the Polans tribe from the Greater Poland region, united

3420-474: The classical languages , have the stress on the antepenultimate (third-from-last) syllable. For example, fizyka ( /ˈfizɨka/ ) ('physics') is stressed on the first syllable. This may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement, for example muzyka /ˈmuzɨka/ 'music' vs. muzyka /muˈzɨka/ – genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. When additional syllables are added to such words through inflection or suffixation ,

3515-578: The flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–50) , as well as the expulsion of Ukrainians and Operation Vistula , the 1947 migration of Ukrainian minorities in the Recovered Territories in the west of the country, contributed to the country's linguistic homogeneity. The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between modern-day vernacular varieties and standard Polish ( język ogólnopolski ) appear relatively slight. Most of

3610-552: The rock salt by the miners. The older sculptures have been supplemented with new carvings made by contemporary artists. About 1.2 million people visit the Wieliczka Salt Mine annually. Notable visitors to this site have included Nicolaus Copernicus , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Alexander von Humboldt , Fryderyk Chopin , Dmitri Mendeleyev , Bolesław Prus , Ignacy Paderewski , Robert Baden-Powell , Jacob Bronowski (who filmed segments of The Ascent of Man in

3705-427: The rock salt , and more recent sculptures by contemporary artists. The Wieliczka Salt Mine reaches a depth of 327 metres (1,073 ft), and extends via horizontal passages and chambers for over 287 kilometres (178 miles). The rock salt is naturally of varying shades of grey, resembling unpolished granite rather than the white crystalline substance that might be expected. Since the 13th century, brine welling up to

3800-404: The standard language ; considerable colloquialisms and expressions were directly borrowed from German or Yiddish and subsequently adopted into the vernacular of Polish which is in everyday use. Historically, Polish was a lingua franca , important both diplomatically and academically in Central and part of Eastern Europe . In addition to being the official language of Poland, Polish

3895-438: The 1.5 kilometres long trail. The St. Kinga Chapel and specific chambers are used for private functions, including weddings. A chamber has walls carved by miners to resemble wood, as in wooden churches built in early centuries. A wooden staircase provides access to the mine's 64-metre (210-foot) level. An elevator (lift) returns visitors to the surface; the elevator holds 36 persons (nine per car) and takes about 30 seconds to make

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3990-416: The 16th century, which is also regarded as the " Golden Age of Polish literature". The orthography was modified in the 19th century and in 1936. Tomasz Kamusella notes that "Polish is the oldest, non-ecclesiastical, written Slavic language with a continuous tradition of literacy and official use, which has lasted unbroken from the 16th century to this day." Polish evolved into the main sociolect of

4085-486: The 2006 census, with a particular concentration in Toronto (91,810 speakers) and Montreal . The geographical distribution of the Polish language was greatly affected by the territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II and Polish population transfers (1944–46) . Poles settled in the " Recovered Territories " in the west and north, which had previously been mostly German -speaking. Some Poles remained in

4180-583: The Henryków monastery, noted that "Hoc est in polonico" ("This is in Polish"). The earliest treatise on Polish orthography was written by Jakub Parkosz  [ pl ] around 1470. The first printed book in Polish appeared in either 1508 or 1513, while the oldest Polish newspaper was established in 1661. Starting in the 1520s, large numbers of books in the Polish language were published, contributing to increased homogeneity of grammar and orthography. The writing system achieved its overall form in

4275-717: The Holocaust . Many prisoners died because of executions, forced labor, and the poor conditions in the camp. The camp was evacuated in January 1945, before the Red Army 's liberation of the area on 20 January. Originally intended as a forced labour camp, the Płaszów concentration camp was constructed on the grounds of two former Jewish cemeteries (including the New Jewish Cemetery ). It was populated with prisoners during

4370-488: The Hungarian horse treadmill and the Saxon treadmill for hauling salt to the surface. By the late 1890s, machine drills and blasting were used to extract salt. During World War II , the mine was used by the occupying Germans as an underground facility for war-related manufacturing. The mine features an underground lake, exhibits on the history of salt mining, and a 3.5-kilometre (2.2-mile) visitors' route (less than 2 percent of

4465-652: The Labyrinth scenes [in Prus' 1895 historical novel, Pharaoh ] stems, among other things, from the fact that they echo Prus' own experiences when visiting Wieliczka." The Wieliczka Salt Mine indeed helped inspire Pharaoh . Prus combined his powerful impressions of the salt mine with the description of the ancient Egyptian Labyrinth , in Book II of Herodotus ' Histories , to produce the remarkable scenes found in chapters 56 and 63 of his novel. In 1995, Preisner's Music ,

4560-671: The Silesian language was recognized by ISO , and was attributed an ISO code of szl. Some additional characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include: Polish linguistics has been characterized by a strong strive towards promoting prescriptive ideas of language intervention and usage uniformity, along with normatively-oriented notions of language "correctness" (unusual by Western standards). Polish has six oral vowels (seven oral vowels in written form), which are all monophthongs , and two nasal vowels . The oral vowels are / i / (spelled i ), / ɨ / (spelled y and also transcribed as /ɘ/ or /ɪ/), / ɛ / (spelled e ), /

4655-591: The Sudetes mountains. Part of the equipment was returned after the war, in autumn 1945. The Jews were transported to factories in Litoměřice (Czech Republic) and Linz (Austria). The mine is one of Poland's official national Historic Monuments ( Pomniki historii ), as designated in the first round, 16 September 1994. Its listing is maintained by the National Heritage Board of Poland . In 2010 it

4750-413: The Wieliczka Salt Mine, granting it many privileges and taking the miners under his care. In 1363 he founded a hospital near the salt mine. It is said that he turned a Poland of wood into a Poland of stone due to the great amount of wood from the neighbouring forests used as scaffolding and supports. Over the period of the mine's operation, many chambers were dug and various technologies were added, such as

4845-699: The Wieliczka mine to work in the underground armament factory set up by the Germans in March and April 1944. The forced labour camp of the mine was established in St. Kinga Park and had about 1,700 prisoners. However, manufacturing never began as the Soviet offensive was nearing. Some of the machines and equipment were disassembled, including an electrical hoisting machine from the Regis Shaft, and transported to Liebenau in

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4940-485: The cases mentioned above, the letter i if followed by another vowel in the same word usually represents / j / , yet a palatalization of the previous consonant is always assumed. The reverse case, where the consonant remains unpalatalized but is followed by a palatalized consonant, is written by using j instead of i : for example, zjeść , "to eat up". The letters ą and ę , when followed by plosives and affricates, represent an oral vowel followed by

5035-713: The corresponding sentence in modern Polish: Daj, niech ja pomielę, a ty odpoczywaj or Pozwól, że ja będę mełł, a ty odpocznij ; and in English: Come, let me grind, and you take a rest ), written around 1280. The book is exhibited in the Archdiocesal Museum in Wrocław, and as of 2015 has been added to UNESCO 's " Memory of the World " list. The medieval recorder of this phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of

5130-479: The disappearance of yers . Polish can have word-initial and word-medial clusters of up to four consonants, whereas word-final clusters can have up to five consonants. Examples of such clusters can be found in words such as bezwzględny [bɛzˈvzɡlɛndnɨ] ('absolute' or 'heartless', 'ruthless'), źdźbło [ˈʑd͡ʑbwɔ] ('blade of grass'), wstrząs [ˈfstʂɔw̃s] ('shock'), and krnąbrność [ˈkrnɔmbrnɔɕt͡ɕ] ('disobedience'). A popular Polish tongue-twister (from

5225-430: The distinction between regular penultimate and exceptional antepenultimate stress. Another class of exceptions is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy , etc. These endings are not counted in determining the position of the stress; for example, zro biłbym ('I would do') is stressed on the first syllable, and zro bi libyśmy ('we would do') on the second. According to prescriptive authorities ,

5320-531: The eastern parts of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth wrote Polish in the Arabic alphabet. The Cyrillic script is used to a certain extent today by Polish speakers in Western Belarus , especially for religious texts. The diacritics used in the Polish alphabet are the kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent ) over the letters ć, ń, ó, ś, ź and through the letter in ł ;

5415-654: The elderly and the sick. There were no gas chambers or crematoria, so mass murder was carried out by shootings. Under Arnold Büscher , the camp's second commandant, prisoners did not experience any shootings or hangings. However, by 1943, the camp was notorious for its terrors. Amon Göth , an SS commandant from Vienna , was the camp commandant at this point. He was sadistic in his treatment and killing of prisoners. "Witnesses say he would never start his breakfast without shooting at least one person." On Göth's first day as camp commandant, he killed two Jewish policemen and made every camp inmate watch. On 13 March 1943, he oversaw

5510-425: The end of the war, then allegedly destroyed them. Orlowski was known for her whippings, especially of young women across their eyes. At roll call she would walk through the lines of women and whip them. Prisoners could also rely on outside help to some degree. The Jüdische Unterstützungsstelle, a support group that the Germans tolerated, would provide the inmates with food and medical assistance. The Zehnerschaft

5605-420: The end of words (where devoicing occurs) and in certain consonant clusters (where assimilation occurs). For details, see Voicing and devoicing in the article on Polish phonology. Most Polish words are paroxytones (that is, the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable of a polysyllabic word), although there are exceptions. Polish permits complex consonant clusters, which historically often arose from

5700-476: The entire country. Polish has traditionally been described as consisting of three to five main regional dialects: Silesian and Kashubian , spoken in Upper Silesia and Pomerania respectively, are thought of as either Polish dialects or distinct languages , depending on the criteria used. Kashubian contains a number of features not found elsewhere in Poland, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs.

5795-467: The following table. The following digraphs and trigraphs are used: Voiced consonant letters frequently come to represent voiceless sounds (as shown in the tables); this occurs at the end of words and in certain clusters, due to the neutralization mentioned in the Phonology section above. Occasionally also voiceless consonant letters can represent voiced sounds in clusters. The spelling rule for

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5890-683: The individual and the mass shootings carried out at Hujowa Górka : a large hill close to the camp commonly used for executions. Some 8,000 deaths took place outside the camp's fences, with prisoners trucked in three to four times weekly. The covered lorries from Kraków would arrive in the morning. The condemned were walked into a trench of the Hujowa Górka hillside, ordered to strip down and stand naked, and then were finally shot. Their bodies were then covered with dirt, layer upon layer. During these mass shootings, all other inmates were forced to watch. In early 1944, all corpses were exhumed and burned on

5985-500: The language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English , 0.25% of the US population, and 6% of the Polish-American population. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census (over 50%) were found in three states: Illinois (185,749), New York (111,740), and New Jersey (74,663). Enough people in these areas speak Polish that PNC Financial Services (which has

6080-597: The later 19th century. A legend about Princess Kinga , associated with the Wieliczka mine, tells of a Hungarian princess about to be married to Bolesław V the Chaste , the Prince of Kraków . As part of her dowry, she asked her father, Béla IV of Hungary , for a lump of salt, since salt was prizeworthy in Poland. Her father King Béla took her to a salt mine in Máramaros. She threw her engagement ring from Bolesław in one of

6175-439: The letter y . The predominant stress pattern in Polish is penultimate stress – in a word of more than one syllable, the next-to-last syllable is stressed. Alternating preceding syllables carry secondary stress, e.g. in a four-syllable word, where the primary stress is on the third syllable, there will be secondary stress on the first. Each vowel represents one syllable, although the letter i normally does not represent

6270-694: The liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto , which took place on 13–14 March 1943 with the first deportations of the Barrackenbau Jews from the Ghetto beginning 28 October 1942. In 1943 the camp was expanded and integrated into the Nazi concentration camp system as a main camp . The Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp was divided into multiple sections. There was a separate area for camp personnel, work facilities, male prisoners, female prisoners, and

6365-467: The liquidation of the nearby Kraków Ghetto , forcing those Jewish inhabitants deemed capable of work into the KL Plaszow camp. Those who were declared unfit for work were either sent to Auschwitz or shot on the spot. People were told to leave their children behind and that they would be cared for. In reality, they were all put in an orphanage and killed. Others snuck their children into the camp. If

6460-519: The march were killed upon arrival. When the Nazis realized the Soviets were approaching Kraków, they completely dismantled the camp, leaving only an empty field. All bodies that had been previously buried in various mass graves were exhumed and burned on site. On 20 January 1945, the Red Army arrived and found only a patch of barren land. Most numbers of inmates and killings rely on estimation, as

6555-431: The middle aged and young speak vernaculars close to standard Polish, while the traditional dialects are preserved among older people in rural areas. First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty recognizing the regional and social differences. The modern standard dialect , often termed as "correct Polish", is spoken or at least understood throughout

6650-511: The mine passages' total length) including statues carved from the rock salt at various times. In 1978 the Wieliczka Salt Mine was placed on the original UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites . The mine was on the List of World Heritage in Danger from 1989 to 1998. This was due to the threat of serious damage being done to the sculptures from humidity caused by artificial ventilation introduced in

6745-479: The mine), the von Unrug family (a prominent Polish-German royal family), Karol Wojtyła (later, Pope John Paul II ), former U.S. President Bill Clinton , and many others. The mine is sectioned into the Tourist Route and Museum Route. The Tourist Route consists of the first 3 levels of the mine. It takes around 1.5 h to see the entire 2.2 kilometres long trail. It's famous for St. Kinga Chapel, components of interior design carved in salt and brine lakes, one of which

6840-460: The most widely spoken variant of Polish across the country, and most dialects stopped being the form of Polish spoken in villages. Poland is one of the most linguistically homogeneous European countries; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their first language . Elsewhere, Poles constitute large minorities in areas which were once administered or occupied by Poland, notably in neighboring Lithuania , Belarus , and Ukraine . Polish

6935-586: The name Tarzan . Krak%C3%B3w-P%C5%82asz%C3%B3w concentration camp Płaszów ( Polish pronunciation: [ˈpwaʂuf] ) or Kraków-Płaszów was a Nazi concentration camp operated by the SS in Płaszów , a southern suburb of Kraków , in the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland . Most of the prisoners were Polish Jews who were targeted for destruction by Nazi Germany during

7030-649: The nobles in Poland–Lithuania in the 15th century. The history of Polish as a language of state governance begins in the 16th century in the Kingdom of Poland . Over the later centuries, Polish served as the official language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , Congress Poland , the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria , and as the administrative language in the Russian Empire 's Western Krai . The growth of

7125-434: The opposite end of the site, stands in memory of the first execution of (non-Jewish) Polish prisoners in 1939. A version of the camp is featured in the movie Schindler's List (1993), about the life of Oskar Schindler . As the Płaszów area is now a nature preserve and modern high-rise apartments were visible from the site, the director Steven Spielberg replicated the camp in the nearby Liban Quarry , which also served as

7220-673: The others being Czech orthography and Croatian orthography , the last of these being a 19th-century invention trying to make a compromise between the first two. Kashubian uses a Polish-based system, Slovak uses a Czech-based system, and Slovene follows the Croatian one; the Sorbian languages blend the Polish and the Czech ones. Historically, Poland's once diverse and multi-ethnic population utilized many forms of scripture to write Polish. For instance, Lipka Tatars and Muslims inhabiting

7315-401: The palatal sounds / ɕ / , / ʑ / , / tɕ / , / dʑ / and / ɲ / is as follows: before the vowel i the plain letters s, z, c, dz, n are used; before other vowels the combinations si, zi, ci, dzi, ni are used; when not followed by a vowel the diacritic forms ś, ź, ć, dź, ń are used. For example, the s in siwy ("grey-haired"), the si in siarka ("sulfur") and

7410-520: The previously Polish-ruled territories in the east that were annexed by the USSR , resulting in the present-day Polish-speaking communities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, although many Poles were expelled from those areas to areas within Poland's new borders. To the east of Poland, the most significant Polish minority lives in a long strip along either side of the Lithuania - Belarus border. Meanwhile,

7505-468: The prisoner card index was destroyed during the camp's destruction. Few postwar trials centered on crimes committed at the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp; one exception was Göth's trial and subsequent death sentence. West German prosecutors took until the late 1950s to investigate these crimes. The area which held the camp now consists of sparsely wooded hills and fields, with one large memorial to all

7600-430: The prisoners as brutally as the men: "When we were loaded on the train in Płaszów, an SS woman hit me on the head. They were so vicious and brutal and sadistic, more than men. I think because some of them were women and you expect kindness, it was shocking. But of course, some were fat and big and ugly." Jewish police were recruited by the camp personnel. They were provided with double rations of thick soup, as opposed to

7695-508: The royal salt mine was operated by the Żupy Krakowskie ( Kraków Salt Mines) company. Due to falling salt prices and mine flooding , commercial salt mining was discontinued in 1996. The Wieliczka Salt Mine is now an official Polish Historic Monument ( Pomnik Historii ) and a UNESCO World Heritage Site . Its attractions include the shafts and labyrinthine passageways, displays of historic salt-mining technology, an underground lake, four chapels and numerous statues carved by miners out of

7790-540: The same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings -śmy, -ście , although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech (so zro bi liśmy 'we did' should be prescriptively stressed on the second syllable, although in practice it is commonly stressed on the third as zrobi li śmy ). These irregular stress patterns are explained by the fact that these endings are detachable clitics rather than true verbal inflections: for example, instead of ko go zoba czy liście? ('whom did you see?') it

7885-410: The series of affricate and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalizations and two further palatalizations that took place in Polish. The full set of consonants, together with their most common spellings, can be presented as follows (although other phonological analyses exist): Neutralization occurs between voiced – voiceless consonant pairs in certain environments, at

7980-605: The shafts before leaving for Poland. On arriving in Kraków, she asked the miners to dig a deep pit until they come upon a rock. The people found a lump of salt in there and when they split it in two, discovered the princess's ring. Kinga had thus become the patron saint of salt miners in and around the Polish capital. During the Nazi occupation, several thousand Jews were transported from the forced labour camps in Plaszow and Mielec to

8075-506: The six of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages . However, it was described by some linguists as lacking most of the linguistic and social determinants of language-hood. Many linguistic sources categorize Silesian as a regional language separate from Polish, while some consider Silesian to be

8170-463: The standard watery soup, and a full loaf of uncontaminated bread. However, the benefits came with cost of having to whip inmates with the whips that the Nazis provided. On 13 September 1944, Göth was relieved of his position and charged by the SS with theft of Jewish property (which belonged to the state, according to Nazi legislation), failure to provide adequate food to the prisoners under his charge, violation of concentration camp regulations regarding

8265-494: The stress normally becomes regular. For example, uniwersytet ( /uɲiˈvɛrsɨtɛt/ , 'university') has irregular stress on the third (or antepenultimate) syllable, but the genitive uniwersytetu ( /uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛtu/ ) and derived adjective uniwersytecki ( /uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛt͡skʲi/ ) have regular stress on the penultimate syllables. Loanwords generally become nativized to have penultimate stress. In psycholinguistic experiments, speakers of Polish have been demonstrated to be sensitive to

8360-611: The surface had been collected and processed for its sodium chloride (table-salt) content. In this period, wells began to be sunk, and the first shafts to be dug to extract the rock salt . From the late 13th to the early 14th century, the Saltworks Castle was built. Wieliczka is now home to the Kraków Saltworks Museum. King Casimir III the Great (reigned 1333–1370) contributed greatly to the development of

8455-408: The treatment and punishment of prisoners, and allowing unauthorised access to camp personnel records by prisoners and non-commissioned officers. Camp administration was assumed by SS- Obersturmführer Arnold Büscher . He improved the inmates' diets by allowing eggs, sugar and powdered milk. The camp was an Arbeitslager ("labour camp"), supplying forced labour to several armament factories and to

8550-684: The trip. The earliest writings about the Wieliczka Salt Mine include a description by Adam Schröter : Salinarum Vieliciensium incunda ac vera descriptio. Carmine elegiaco... (1553); augmented edition, Regni Poloniae Salinarum Vieliciensium descriptio. Carmine elegiaco... (1564). The Polish journalist and novelist Bolesław Prus described his 1878 visit to the salt mine in a remarkable series of three articles, " Kartki z podróży (Wieliczka) " ["Travel Notes (Wieliczka)"], in Kurier Warszawski (The Warsaw Courier), 1878, nos. 36–38. The great Prus scholar Zygmunt Szweykowski writes: "The power of

8645-570: The victims and two smaller monuments (one to the Jewish victims generally, and another to the Hungarian Jewish victims) at one perimeter of where the camp once stood. The Jewish cemetery, where the Nazis removed all but one of the tombstones, stands on the side of the hill at the eastern end of the camp, near the Grey house. Amon Göth's villa remains there. Another small monument, located near

8740-563: The vowel i is changed to y , e.g. Syria , Sybir , synchronizacja , Syrakuzy . The following table shows the correspondence between the sounds and spelling: Digraphs and trigraphs are used: Similar principles apply to / kʲ / , / ɡʲ / , / xʲ / and /lʲ/ , except that these can only occur before vowels, so the spellings are k, g, (c)h, l before i , and ki, gi, (c)hi, li otherwise. Most Polish speakers, however, do not consider palatalization of k, g, (c)h or l as creating new sounds. Except in

8835-443: The word, the phoneme / x / can be spelt h or ch , the phoneme / ʐ / can be spelt ż or rz , and / u / can be spelt u or ó . In several cases it determines the meaning, for example: może ("maybe") and morze ("sea"). In occasional words, letters that normally form a digraph are pronounced separately. For example, rz represents /rz/ , not / ʐ / , in words like zamarzać ("freeze") and in

8930-484: Was a group of women that also supported the inmates. The Polish Welfare Organization sent food to Polish prisoners and some of them shared with the Jewish inmates. There were also individuals such as Stanislaw Dobrowolski , the head of the Kraków branch of the Council for Aid to Jews (Żegota), and Tadeusz Pankiewicz , a famous pharmacist, also aided the prisoners. Göth and the other camp personnel punished inmates for

9025-693: Was successfully proposed that the nearby historic Bochnia Salt Mine (Poland's oldest salt mine) be added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. The two sister salt mines now appear together in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites as the "Wieliczka and Bochnia Royal Salt Mines". In 2013 the UNESCO World Heritage Site was expanded by the addition of the Żupny Castle . The mine is currently one of Poland's official national Historic Monuments ( Pomniki historii ), whose attractions include dozens of statues and four chapels carved out of

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