Oskar Schindler in Kraków: the true story

Before Schindler: the people of the ghetto

It's best to start with the people. In 1938 around 65,000 Jews lived in Kraków; historians estimate that around 2,200 survived the war.

On 3 March 1941 the German authorities ordered a ghetto to be set up in Podgórze, on the south bank of the Vistula. More than 16,000 people were crammed into some 320 houses, three in four of them run-down shacks, where about 3,000 had lived before. In 1942 most of them were deported, chiefly to the Bełżec extermination camp. On 13 and 14 March 1943 the ghetto was liquidated: some 6,000 people were taken to the Płaszów camp, around 2,000 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and about 1,000 were murdered on the spot.

Who was Oskar Schindler?

He was born in 1908 in Zwittau, in Moravia, into a German-speaking Catholic family in the Sudetenland, and he studied engineering. Like most young Sudeten Germans, he joined Konrad Henlein's party, which backed Nazi Germany, and in 1938 he became a formal member of the Nazi Party. He also worked for the Abwehr, German military intelligence.

German troops entered Kraków on 6 September 1939, and Schindler probably arrived in those same days, aged thirty-one. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, describes him at first as just another of the Germans who came to get rich from the occupation: cunning, not overly scrupulous, a gambler, partying with senior SS officers.

Whose factory was it?

It began with three Jewish businessmen. The factory on Lipowa Street, in Zabłocie, was founded in March 1937 by Michał Gutman from Będzin, Izrael Kohn from the Kazimierz district and Wolf Luzer Glajtman from Olkusz. It was called Rekord and made enamelled pots and pans. In June 1939 it filed for bankruptcy.

Schindler started out as the trustee of a Jewish kitchenware shop on Krakowska Street. In the autumn of 1939 he took over the bankrupt company, and on 15 January 1940 he leased the buildings. With capital from Abraham Bankier, a former Rekord shareholder, and Samuel Wiener, who owned a shop on Krakowska Street, he bought the site and renamed the factory Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik, or DEF. He expanded it to plans drawn up by the former partners, with capital from Jewish businessmen who were given goods or work at the factory in exchange. Legal ownership didn't pass to him until 1942.

The DEF went on making enamelware and, to keep going, supplies for the German army too: mess tins, shell casings and fuses. At first most of the workers were Poles; with the ghetto came more and more Jewish workers, marched there and back under escort. Their number rose from just over a hundred in 1940 to around 1,100 in 1944, counting those from three neighbouring firms.

What did he do to protect his workers?

According to Yad Vashem, Schindler never developed any ideological resistance to the regime. What set him apart from other profiteers was his humane treatment of his workforce, especially its Jewish members, and a growing revulsion at the brutality he saw. In time, the memorial says, he was ready to spend all his money and risk his life for them.

His best tool was bureaucratic. The factory was classed as essential to the war effort, which allowed him to claim his workers back when the SS wanted to deport them. He falsified the records: on his staff lists, children, housewives and lawyers appeared as skilled mechanics. More than once the Gestapo detained him on charges of favouring Jews. In 1943 he travelled to Budapest, at the invitation of an American Jewish aid organisation, to tell two representatives of Hungarian Jewry what was happening in Poland.

After the ghetto was liquidated, he persuaded Amon Goeth, the brutal commandant of Płaszów and one of his drinking companions, to let him set up a sub-camp beside the factory. It had barbed wire and watchtowers, but the food was considerably better than in Płaszów, partly thanks to what Schindler bought on the black market with his own money.

What was Schindler's list?

In late 1944, with the Red Army drawing closer, Płaszów was evacuated: more than 20,000 men, women and children were sent to extermination camps. Schindler obtained permission to carry on production at Brünnlitz, in the Sudetenland, in a former textile mill that he'd prepared with his wife, Emilie. The whole Zabłocie workforce was supposed to move there, and many new names from Płaszów were quietly added to the roll. That was the list.

The trains never got there. The 800 men, 700 of them Jews, were diverted to Gross-Rosen; the 300 women, to Auschwitz. Schindler first managed to get the men released. For the women, he sent his personal secretary to Auschwitz to negotiate, and their release was won with a promise to pay seven Reichsmarks a day for each worker. Yad Vashem knows of no other case in which so large a group was allowed out of Auschwitz alive at a time when its gas chambers were still in use.

In January 1945, two sealed cattle wagons reached the gates of Brünnlitz, carrying 120 Jewish prisoners from Goleszów, a sub-camp of Auschwitz, after seven days without food or water. Emilie Schindler arrived just in time to stop the commandant sending the train back. The Schindlers nursed the 107 survivors, and Oskar bought a plot beside the Catholic cemetery so the dead could be buried with Jewish rites.

Around 1,200 people were working at Brünnlitz when the Red Army liberated them on 8 May 1945.

What became of Schindler and his factory?

Schindler ended the war penniless, and for years Jewish organisations and groups of survivors supported him in a modest way. He died in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1974, and the survivors brought him to rest in the Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem. His grave calls him the unforgettable rescuer of 1,200 persecuted Jews. In 1993 Yad Vashem recognised Oskar and Emilie Schindler as Righteous Among the Nations.

The factory was nationalised, and from 1948 to 2002 it was used by a telecommunications company. Three things survive unchanged from the DEF: the two-columned gateway, the façade at 4 Lipowa Street and the pitched roofs of the workshops. The administrative building houses an exhibition by the Museum of Kraków on the city under occupation, and the workshops a museum of contemporary art.

Fact or legend.

Fact: three Jewish businessmen set up the factory in 1937; Schindler took it over when it was bankrupt and only became its legal owner in 1942.

Fact: the ghetto was in Podgórze, not in Kazimierz, where much of the film was shot.

Fact: around 1,200 people were liberated at Brünnlitz on 8 May 1945.

The sources don't agree on everything: the month he took over the factory (October or November 1939) and the number of workers in a given year.

Unconfirmed: that a particular courtyard on Józefa Street was used for scenes in the film. Tour agencies say so; we haven't found a production source.

What we don't know: what was going on in his head. Yad Vashem describes an opportunist who was gradually transformed; we don't credit him with thoughts nobody wrote down.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "From Jewish Kazimierz to the Podgórze Ghetto", eleven stops in all. The fifth, "Schindler beyond the film", is heard where the bridge over the Vistula begins, looking across to the bank where the ghetto stood. On the other side, "The forced move in March" tells of the move into the ghetto, "The pharmacy that stayed" introduces the pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz, and "March 1943 and the road to Płaszów" covers the end of the ghetto. If you're planning your trip, our Kraków guide has the practical side covered.

Oskar Schindler in Kraków: the true story beyond the film

Before Schindler: the people of the ghetto

Who was Oskar Schindler?

Whose factory was it?

What did he do to protect his workers?

What was Schindler's list?

What became of Schindler and his factory?

Where to hear it

Further reading

Where to hear this story

From Jewish Kazimierz to the Podgórze Ghetto

Plan your time in Kraków

Your first city,
on Podtour.

Your first city,
on Podtour.

Before Schindler: the people of the ghetto

Who was Oskar Schindler?

Whose factory was it?

What did he do to protect his workers?

What was Schindler's list?

What became of Schindler and his factory?

Where to hear it

Further reading

Where to hear this story

From Jewish Kazimierz to the Podgórze Ghetto

Plan your time in Kraków

Your first city,on Podtour.

Your first city,on Podtour.

Your first city,
on Podtour.

Your first city,
on Podtour.