Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory

Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera

The museum »Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory«, short Schindler's factory, opened in 2010 and provides information on the time of the German occupation of Cracow 1939-1945 as well as on the saving of more than 1,000 Jews by the entrepreneur Oskar Schindler (1908–1974).

History

Until 1596 Cracow (Polish: Kraków) was the capital of the Kingdom of Poland. Jews lived there since the 12th century. In addition many Jews lived in the town of Kazimierz which was incorporated into Cracow in 1867. At that time Cracow was part of Austria-Hungary but was considered to be the centre of the Polish independence movement. In 1918, Cracow became part of the independent Polish Republic.
After the German attack on Poland Cracow was occupied on September 6, 1939. In October the occupants installed the General Government (German: Generalgouvernement) in central Poland, practically a colony of the Third Reich, iand chose Cracow instead of Warsaw as its capital. Governor-General Hans Frank set up his headquarters in the Wawel complex, once the royal castle.
From the start Jews were persecuted. Of the approximately 60,000 Jews of Cracow Frank expelled about 43,000 in 1940. In March of 1941 the Jews had to move to a ghetto in the borough of Podgórze. The living conditions there were catastrophic. In 1942 the SS murdered more than 10,000 Jews from the ghetto in the Bełżec extermination camp with poison gas during various »Aktionen«. In March 1943 the ghetto was liquidated: part of its population was murdered by the SS in Auschwitz, those fit for work were deported to the nearby concentration camp of Płaszów.
The entrepreneur Oskar Schindler came to Cracow in 1939 and bought an enamel factory. There he employed Jewish forced labourers but treated them humane. On the site of the factory he arranged for the construction of a satellite camp of the Płaszów concentration camp. With tricks and bribery he managed to save several hundred Jews. When in 1944 it became clear that all the remaining Jews of Cracow were to be murdered, Schindler moved his factory to Brünnlitz (Czech: Brněnec) in Bohemia. To save as many lives as possible he entered many false data into the transport list. Thus more than 1,100 escaped death, among them elderly and children.

Cracow, 1939, Parade of a police battalion in front of Governor-General Hans Frank and Himmler, Bundesarchiv, Bild 121-0269

Cracow, 2011, External view of »Schindler's factory«, Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa Oddzial Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera

Victims

During the war Cracow was by and large spared from combat operations but the loss of human life was nevertheless enormous. Hans Frank established a murderous terror regime. Cracow was to become a German city, for that Poles were to be suppressed and exploited and Jews were destined to be annihilated. Almost all of the 60,000 Jews of Cracow were murdered by the German occupants, thousands of Poles, particularly members of the elite were executed or transferred to concentration camps. As early as November 1939 Frank had 183 professors of Cracow arrested and deported to the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Also the loss of property in Cracow was very high, many of the looted cultural assets remain lost to the present.
In the autumn of 1944 Oskar Schindler managed to put 801 men and 297 women on his list and to transfer them to Brünnlitz (Czech: Brněnec). They were liberated there by the Red Army in May 1945.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

After the war the Jews saved by Oskar Schindler supported the public recognition of Oskar Schindler as a lifesaver. In 1962 Schindler was honoured in the Jerusalem memorial Yad Vashem while in Germany he remained largely unknown and had financial difficulties. After his death in 1974 he was buried in Israel. In 1993 the story of the saving of the »Schindler Jews« became famous worldwide thanks to Steven Spielberg's film »Schindler's List«. The film triggered a tourism boom to Cracow: Since then hundreds of thousands of visitors want to discover the traces of Jewish life in Cracow each year, especially in the borough of Kazimierz.
In 2005 the city of Cracow purchased the site of the former enamel factory of Oskar Schindler. The three-storey administration building in the borough of Podgórze survived, unlike the satellite camp. In 2010 the museum »Oskar Schindler's Enamel Factory« opened, a branch of the Historical Museum of the City of Cracow. The interactive multimedia permanent exhibition does not mainly address the story of Oskar Schindler but the German occupation of Cracow 1939-1945 in general. The visitors get an impression of everyday life during the war, including that of the Polish population as well as that of the Jews locked into the ghetto. Among the further subjects of the exhibition are the Polish resistance movement, the Płaszów concentration camp and the city's liberation in January 1945.

Cracow, 2010, View of the permanent exhibition, Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa Oddzial Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera

Cracow, Replica of Oskar Schindler's office at the permanent exhibition, Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa Oddzial Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, special exhibitions, guided tours for groups and individuals, thematic guided tours and walks, readings, workshops

Open

November to March: Monday 10a.m. to 2 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.;

April to October: Monday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (first Monday of the month to 2 p.m.), Tuesday to Sunday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Contact

https://muzeumkrakowa.pl/oddzialy/fabryka-emalia-oskara-schindlera

fabrykaschindlera@muzeumkrakowa.pl

+48 (0)12 257 00 96

ul. Lipowa 4
30-702 Kraków

Cracow, 1941, Raid by German order police in Kazimierz, Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-030-0780-23

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