The popularity of the Schindler Factory – a branch of the Museum of Kraków – which opened 15 years ago, has since led to the creation of a new museum at the nearby KL Plaszow concentration camp.

The Schindler Factory is a part of the Museum of Kraków, and displays a narrative of Kraków life during World War II under Nazi German occupation.

The new KL Plaszow museum, set to open its doors to the public in 2026/2027, is to bolster the narrative proposed by the Schindler Factory, whose popularity among visitors has been cemented thanks to the 1993 Hollywood film “Schindler’s List” directed by Steven Spielberg. Even nowadays, many visitors who come to the Schindler Factory do so on account of the motion picture.

How can the two museums complement each other, and how is it that the KL Plaszow Holocaust memorial site went for so long without being properly commemorated?

Katarzyna Jagodzińska meets with Monika Bednarek, director of the KL Plaszow Museum, as well as Bartosz Heksel, manager of the Schindler Factory branch of the Museum of Kraków.

For this episode of Heritage Hour we are in Nowa Huta, an industrial city which was built as a workers’ neighbourhood in the socialist-realist style in the late 1940s, acting as a proletarian counterweight to the seemingly snobbish and intellectual city of Kraków.

Over seven decades later, and Nowa Huta’s sprawling steelworks have all but disappeared, the district is one of the greenest in Kraków, and new challenges await. While the city is on the Polish historical monuments register (designated as a pomnik historii), it now has a chance to promote itself further by applying to UNESCO. But is such a heritage label what Nowa Huta really wants, or needs?

John Beauchamp and Katarzyna Jagodzińska meet with two experts from Nowa Huta to discuss its very phenomenon. Katarzyna Kobylarczyk, a local journalist, author and social archivist, as well as Jarosław Klaś, Director of the Norwid Cultural Centre in Nowa Huta.

Is sound heritage? Sound is inherent to every building, every object. A wind which whistles its way through a church door, the bustle of people on a market square, the echo inside a church or even farm machinery harvesting the year's crops...

And yet, we still rarely think about sound as part of heritage. For this episode of Holistic Heritage, hosts John Beauchamp and Dr Katarzyna Jagodzińska are in the Portuguese town of Mafra at the UNESCO site of the Royal Buildings of the Palace, Basilica and Convent, where heritage and museum specialists have gathered to discuss sound in museums and heritage sites.

In the episode, we speak to Alcina Cortez, a sonic researcher and founder of the Sound in Museums Conference, as well as Luisa Santos Professor at the Catholic University of Portugal and a curator at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, on the role of sound in heritage.

As part of our endeavours of raising awareness of the sonic layer of heritage and making heritage sounds more accessible, the Europa Nostra Heritage Hub for Central and Eastern Europe has set up the Heritage Sound Register. While still in its initial phase, it aims to provide the public with free to use sounds.

Among the sounds on the register you can hear a number of sound artefacts which are an inherent part of the cultural heritage of Central and Eastern Europe. In the podcast, you can hear the industrial complex in Dolni Vitkovice in Ostrava, a mechanical loom at Łódź's Central Museum of Textiles, a excavator at the Queen Louise Adit in Zabrze, and the Mocănița logging train in Romania's Maramureș region. You can find more here.