Galicia Jewish Museum

The Galicia Jewish Museum does something most Holocaust museums don't — it looks forward as well as back. Founded in 2004 by British photographer Chris Schwarz, the museum's permanent exhibition 'Traces of Memory' uses large-format photographs of Jewish sites across southern Poland to show what remains, what's been destroyed, and what's been reclaimed. A restored synagogue sits beside an overgrown cemetery. A memorial stands in a field where a town once was. The images are beautiful and devastating in equal measure.

The museum occupies a renovated industrial building in Kazimierz and deliberately avoids the darkness-and-horror approach of many Holocaust exhibitions. Instead, it presents Jewish heritage as a living subject — temporary exhibitions cover contemporary Jewish art, culture, and the revival of Jewish life in Poland. There's a bookshop with the best selection of English-language books on Polish-Jewish history in the city.

Schwarz died in 2007, three years after opening the museum, but his vision of telling the story through what exists now — rather than archive footage of what was destroyed — gives the museum an immediacy that more traditional exhibitions lack. You leave thinking about the present, not just the past, which in a city with Kraków's history feels like an achievement.