Archive News Stories of 2012 from Krakow Info
Year 2012
Krakow Mourns
Its Nobel-Winning Poet
Nobel
literature winner, poetess Wislawa Szymborska, died
of lung cancer in Krakow on February 1st, 2012. Born
in 1923, she was permanently domiciled in Krakow
since 1929 and later on worked for the city’s
literary weekly. Ms Szymborska won the 1996 Nobel
Prize in Literature as the forth Polish writer and
the last one to date. In her last will and testament
the famously shy and retiring poet wished to be
cremated and laid to rest in her family tomb at
Krakow’s Cmentarz Rakowicki cemetery without any
religious ceremony.
Auschwitz Barracks Ensnared In a Washington Museum.
Polish government begs
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC
to return the borrowed
Auschwitz barracks to their rightful owner and
the place they belong. In the late 1980s Poland lent
the dreary wooden barracks together with other
artifacts from the notorious Nazi death camp to the
Washington museum. Now the twenty-year loan has
expired but the museum refuses to give the barracks
back to Auschwitz. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum and its influential supporters argue that the
barracks constitute the centerpiece of its applauded
exhibition and without them it wouldn’t be the same.
Different opinions about the proper place for the
Auschwitz barracks is one thing. Another is the
current Polish law which says that no museum piece
may stay abroad longer than five years.
Euro 2012 Football in Krakow
The municipality of
Krakow expects 200,000 football fans to visit the
city in June 2012 owing to Euro 2012, the European
football championships hosted jointly by Poland and
Ukraine. No matches are planned here but the
reputation of Poland’s foremost tourist destination
should suffice. Also, three most prominent national
sides - the English, Dutchmen, and Italians - have
made Krakow their base. The city tempts soccer
enthusiasts with a Fan Zone for 30,000 with live
transmissions of matches, eating places, pubs,
souvenir stalls, playgrounds for kids, mini soccer
pitches, beauty parlors, and a spa as well as
toilets, first aid, and information booths.
Agnieszka Radwanska,
the Superstar.
The WTA second best
tennis player - as of mid-July, 2012 - has been
Krakow’s top sporting hero for years already but her
reaching this year’s final of the ladies’ singles at
Wimbledon has made Agnieszka Radwanska the
all-Poland idol. No Pole has won any Grand Slam
title ever and 73 years elapsed since Ja-ja (or Jed
though actually Jadwiga) Jedrzejowska, another
native of Krakow, had got to a Grand Slam singles
final last time. And now everybody in Poland hopes
for a medal in tennis at the London Olympic Games
this August; or better two as Miss Radwanska will
probably play both singles and doubles, teamed up
with her younger sister Urszula.
(tennis in Krakow)
The Krakow Dozen for
London .
A dozen sportsmen and
sportswomen from Krakow have qualified for this
year’s Olympic Games at London. Two of them are
tennis sisters Urszula and Agnieszka Radwanska. The
remaining ten consist of three white-water kayakers,
four track and field athletes, one judoka, one
shooter, and one fencer. Only one of them, Radoslaw
Zawrotniak, is already an Olympic medalist as a
member of Poland’s squad that won silver in epee at
Beijing. Yet at least six seemed good enough to
thought realistically about winning a medal at London.
Unfortunately the latest Wimbledon finalist Agnieszka Radwanska
has disappointed her fans losing the very first
match. In total, 216 Olympians
represent Poland at the 2012 Olympic Games.
On the Site of
Plaszow Concentration Camp: a Patch-Up
Maintenance
works on the site of the
Plaszow concentration camp
in Krakow, long overdue, are scheduled for this
autumn, i.e. September through November. Municipal
corporation ZIKiT has planned mowing, uprooting of
self-sown trees and bushes, waste removal, gravel
footpaths, a fence on the boundary between the area
and private properties, and five information boards
at a cost of 425,000 Polish zloties, an equivalent
of roughly euro 100,000. It’s a far cry from turning
the place into an imaginative memorial - as
envisioned in a stalled design of 2007 - to
thousands of mostly Jewish victims who suffered
here, and great many died, between 1942 and 1945.
Yet at least there is hope that the place will stop
to resemble an abandoned wasteland.
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