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ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Centropa’s AudioWalks take you on a journey through the Jewish history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Use our multimedia maps, and explore the family pictures, archival material, and personal stories of 21 Jewish Holocaust survivors to get a unique insight into Europe’s rich Jewish heritage, and to discover sites of Jewish life in towns in Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.

Lwowska Street 7

9. Lwowska Street 7 — Madritsch

Element 340
Ul. Lwowska 7, Tarnów
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Lwowska Street is one of the main arteries of the city. Before the Second World War, there were shops, cafes, Jewish prayer houses and workshops, and representatives of political parties and movements had their seats here. During the war, this street became the border between the ghetto and the rest of the world.

Here, at number 7, were the workshops of Julius Madritsch, an Austrian entrepreneur who was brought to occupied Poland by economic opportunism. He was active in the textile industry and initially limited his activity only to Krakow. However, the contract he obtained from the German Wehrmacht diversified and expanded his interests, which is why he opened workshops in Tarnów and in Bochnia.

Julius Madritsch gained a reputation as a businessman who treated Jewish workers humanely. He tried to help as many people as he could, also after the liquidation of the Tarnów ghetto and the transfer of the workshops to the Zwangsarbeiterlager Plaszow (a forced labour camp in Krakow which later became Plaszow concentration camp).

Gizela Fudem worked for Madritsch for some time. She, describes the work in his camp workshops:

There, at the ‘Madritsch’, in the company where we worked, it was not too bad, because he tried to get additional bread and not the clay that was given to us there, (…) The bread for his workers was brought somewhere ‘from freedom’ and we got a quarter portion of bread there as an extra, above the usual food ration…

For their wartime activities and help in saving Jews, Julius Madritsch and his associates were recognized as the Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

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