Famous people & notable figures
People who came from — or shaped — each place.
Amsterdam & the Netherlands
- Rembrandt van Rijn — the towering painter of the Dutch Golden Age.
- Vincent van Gogh — the Dutch post-Impressionist master; the world's largest collection of his work is here.
- Johannes Vermeer — Dutch Golden Age painter of luminous interiors.
- Anne Frank — the young diarist who hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam canal house.
- Baruch Spinoza — one of the most influential philosophers of the Enlightenment, born in Amsterdam in 1632.
- M. C. Escher — the Dutch graphic artist famous for impossible, mind-bending images.
Kraków & Poland
- Pope John Paul II — Karol Wojtyła was Archbishop of Kraków before his election as pope in 1978.
- Nicolaus Copernicus — the astronomer who placed the Sun at the center of the cosmos; he studied at Kraków's Jagiellonian University.
- Oskar Schindler — the German industrialist who saved about 1,200 Jews; his Kraków factory is now a museum.
- Wisława Szymborska — the Nobel Prize-winning poet who made her home in Kraków.
- Roman Polanski — the filmmaker and Holocaust survivor who grew up in Kraków.
- Helena Rubinstein — the global cosmetics pioneer, born in Kraków's Kazimierz district.