In the spring of 1993, a few hundred meters from a place where the Nazis had killed people, builders were putting up a replica of the camp where it had happened. The decision was one of the strangest—and, at the same time, one of the most exact—in film history.
The Płaszów concentration camp existed on the slope of Krzemionki Hill in Kraków’s Podgórze district from 1942 to 1945. Tens of thousands of people passed through it—Jews, Poles, Roma. As the Red Army approached Kraków, the Nazis did what they almost always did: they tried to erase the traces. The barracks were dismantled, the bodies exhumed and burned, the ground leveled. By liberation, the camp had become a wasteland—a grass-grown slope beneath which the earth still held charred human bones, fragments of foundations, the detritus of destruction.
By the early 1990s, the hill looked like a neglected park. No barracks, no towers, no fences—nothing for a camera lens to catch on. But the issue, of course, was not the lack of scenery. The grounds of former Płaszów are a cemetery. Not metaphorically, but literally: the ashes of the murdered are mixed into the soil, and every step on that grass is a step over someone’s remains. When Steven Spielberg and his team came to Kraków to scout locations, the question of filming on the camp grounds arose and was settled quickly. To film here would mean turning a site of mass murder into a movie set—with generators, camera tracks, an actors’ buffet, and cries of “Action!” over bones. Spielberg refused.
This decision is often presented as a gesture of respect, and it truly was one. But there was a practical side, too: there was nothing to film on a bare slope. The camp had to be rebuilt—completely, from scratch, somewhere else. And that somewhere was nearby, literally beyond the hill.
The Liban quarry was an industrial pit founded in 1873 by the entrepreneurs Bernard Liban and Ehrenpreis to extract limestone. By the end of the 19th century, it was an ordinary Kraków enterprise, supplying stone for construction. By the middle of the 20th century, the quarry had been exhausted and stood abandoned—an enormous wound in the ground, with sheer walls, a flat floor, and access roads.
But the quarry had its own dark chapter. In 1942–1944, the Nazis established a penal labor camp for Poles here—Straflager Krakau-Liban. More than 2,000 prisoners passed through it, forced to crush stone under inhuman conditions. It was not an extermination camp in the sense that Płaszów was, but the system of forced labor killed people with the same inevitability, only more slowly—through hunger, beatings, exhaustion. The Liban quarry and Płaszów camp stood side by side and were parts of the same occupation machine, grinding people down in Kraków’s Podgórze district.
What I can’t shake is this detail: so as not to disturb one crime scene, the film crew came to another. The Liban quarry was not neutral ground—it was itself a space of violence. But by 1993, few people remembered that, and the pit was seen simply as an abandoned industrial site with convenient terrain. The high limestone walls shut out the horizon and blocked the view of modern Kraków, the flat floor provided room to build, and its proximity to real Płaszów made it possible to use the same landscape, the same sky, the same light.
Allan Starski was a Polish production designer who had already worked with Andrzej Wajda by then. Spielberg brought him in precisely because he needed someone who knew the Polish context from within, someone able to distinguish authentic texture from Hollywood’s notion of Eastern Europe. Starski and his team were given a task that sounds almost absurd: build a concentration camp.
Their sources were archival photographs of Płaszów—few of them survived, since the Nazis photographed the camp mostly for internal documentation—testimony from surviving prisoners, who described its layout, and surviving features of the landscape—the contours of the hills, the placement of roads. Starski worked from the camp’s original plans, restoring its spatial logic: where the barracks stood, where the perimeter ran, where the commandant watched the prisoners from.
In the quarry, they built 34 barracks, guard towers—sources give figures ranging from 7 to 11, the discrepancy stemming from the fact that some towers were background elements and others full structures used for filming—a gate, barbed-wire fencing, and Amon Göth’s villa. Göth was the camp commandant, played by Ralph Fiennes. The villa stood on high ground, as it had in reality: Göth shot at prisoners from the balcony, and Janusz Kamiński’s camera had to recreate this geometry of power—the gaze from above, the rifle against a defenseless body below.
One of the set’s most difficult details was the road paved with mock Jewish tombstones, matzevot. In real Płaszów, the Nazis used actual gravestones from Jewish cemeteries to pave the roads—an act of desecration that turned memory of the dead into cobblestones beneath boots. Starski recreated it with props, and here a fine line emerges: is a replica tombstone an insult or a testimony? The film placed its bet on the latter.
Filming of Schindler’s List began in March 1993 and lasted more than 72 days. The Liban quarry was one of the key locations, but not the only one—the film was also shot in Kraków itself, in Kazimierz, and at Schindler’s factory. Yet it is the scenes in the “camp” that form the emotional center of the picture.
The quarry was used for scenes of hard labor—and here film and reality merged until they became indistinguishable, because prisoners of the real Liban camp had done exactly the same thing: crushed stone within these very walls. It was also where they filmed the execution of Diana Reiter—the engineer who pointed out a construction error and was shot by Göth for her audacity, played by Elina Löwensohn. And the scene of Oskar Schindler’s (Liam Neeson) meeting with Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley)—the moment when the businessman begins to grasp the scale of what is happening.
Janusz Kamiński shot on black-and-white film, and that decision amplified Starski’s set: monochrome erased mismatched colors, concealed the newness of freshly cut boards, made props indistinguishable from documentary footage. The camera often worked handheld, trembling, losing focus—techniques borrowed from wartime newsreels. The result: the viewer does not see a set. The viewer sees a camp.
The film won 7 Oscars from 12 nominations. Among them were Best Art Direction (Starski) and Best Cinematography (Kamiński). In essence, the Academy rewarded precisely this illusion—the ability to make a constructed world look like reality caught by a camera.
After filming ended, something unplanned happened: the sets in the Liban quarry were not fully dismantled. The barracks deteriorated over time, but fragments of fencing, stairways, mock matzevot tombstones remained in the pit. The wood darkened, the wire rusted, and gradually the props began to look the way authentic ruins of a camp should look—except these were the ruins of a replica.
A situation arose that still gives historians and memorial workers headaches. People come to the quarry, see the remains of barracks, barbed wire, stone slabs with Hebrew inscriptions—and take it all for traces of a real camp. In a sense, they are right: the Liban quarry truly was a site of forced labor. But what they are seeing is not artifacts of the occupation, but props from a Hollywood film. The real crime scene lies beyond the hill, and there is nothing there but grass and memorial markers.
Two spaces exist a few hundred meters from one another: real Płaszów, where the remains of the murdered lie beneath the ground—empty and quiet; and the Liban quarry, where the ruins of a mock camp stand—visually persuasive, and therefore drawing visitors in. The imitation proved more durable than the original the Nazis destroyed. Fragments of the set survive in the quarry to this day, and the question of what to do with them—remove them, preserve them, provide explanatory plaques—has never received a final answer.
Spielberg’s decision—to build a replica rather than film on site—seems self-evident. But it became self-evident precisely because he made it. Before 1993, cinema had not developed a stable protocol for dealing with sites of mass violence. There had been films shot in real camps, documentary projects using authentic spaces. Spielberg drew a line: fiction film has no right to occupy ground that belongs to the dead.
But this boundary is a shifting one. The replica camp was built on the grounds of another camp. A film crew of several hundred people worked in a quarry where prisoners had died half a century earlier. Generators hummed, actors in striped prison uniforms ate sandwiches between takes, and the quarry walls remembered very different striped uniforms. Can this be called ethically impeccable? I don’t think so. Can it be called the best of the available choices? Most likely, yes.
Artistic reconstruction is a strange tool. It is inherently inexact: Starski’s 34 barracks did not stand at the same coordinates as the barracks of real Płaszów, Göth’s villa was simplified, the scale adjusted to the needs of the camera. This is neither an archaeological reconstruction nor a museum exhibition—it is a cinematic model, created to convey structure and atmosphere rather than topographical precision. Yet it is precisely this honest artifice that, paradoxically, makes the set ethically cleaner than filming on location: the viewer sees an image of catastrophe, not catastrophe itself turned into spectacle.
Real Płaszów today is a memorial site with monuments and information boards. The Liban quarry is a semi-abandoned space where nature slowly consumes plywood walls and rusted wire. Between them lie a few minutes’ walk and a question for which I have no ready answer: when the ruins of a set lie beside a place of real murder, what exactly are we remembering—history, or the film about it?