Zinar Castle

The great history of World War II intersects here with everyday life, private life - with a tragedy that touched the whole world.

The factory at 4 Lipowa Street started operating two years before the war. In the fall of 1939, when it was taken from three Jewish owners, it was handed over to a Sudeten German, Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), a member of the NSDAP and most likely a collaborator of the Abwehr. Thanks to his extensive connections, he obtained for his Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik, commonly known as Enamel, numerous orders - both civil (pots, spoons, etc.) and military (e.g. canteens, and later also bullet cases) - which brought him a lot of income.

Schindler employed Jews, initially for economic reasons - they were free labor. Probably the uprising of the ghetto and brutal deportation actions made him realize that, as the director of a prospering factory, he had a chance to help these people - the kencards issued to Jewish workers protected them against deportations and deportations to camps.

After the liquidation of the ghetto (March 1943). r.) thanks to his contacts and bribes, Schindler obtained permission to set up a sub-camp in Płaszów on the premises of the factory. His employees lived in barracks built by the factory, away from the sadistic camp commandant Amon Goeth and his guards. The factory became a safe haven for about 1,000 people, including the elderly, the sick and children, where the sanitary conditions and food rations were much better than in the camp.

When, in the face of the lost war, the Nazis began to prepare for evacuation, the sub-camp in Emalia was closed. Then Schindler started an ammunition factory in Brünnlitz (Czech Republic) and employed "his" Jews there. In this way he saved the lives of about 1,100 people.

The war history of the factory and its then owner Oskar Schindler, and the fate of the Jewish workers he saved, prisoners of the Plaszow labor camp near Krakow, are known around the world thanks to Steven Spielberg's film List Schindler from 1993. Today, the administrative building of the former enamelware factory houses a branch of the Krakow Museum - eagerly visited by tourists from different countries who want to see the place where, thanks to Oskar Schindler, over a thousand people were saved. In the permanent exhibition presented here, the figure of the German entrepreneur, "righteous among the nations of the world", and the fate of the Krakow Jews he saved are presented as part of the complicated history of the city during the Nazi occupation in 1939-1945. The great history of World War II intersects here with everyday life, private stories - with a tragedy that touched the whole world.