SS officer Amon Goeth, the commandant of the Plaszow labor camp,
had made the final liquidation of the Crakow ghetto and had experience at
three death camps in eastern Poland, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka ...
conditions of life at Plaszow were made dreadful by Goeth. A prisoner in
Plaszow was very lucky if he could survive in this camp more than four
weeks. The camp shown in Spielberg's film Schindler's List is the
exact description of Plaszow.
Goeth passed his mornings by using his high-powered, scoped rifle to shoot
at children playing in the camp - he often would use it as an incentive to
work harder. For example, some young men hauling coal were moving too slow
for his liking. He shot one of them with his sniper rifle so the rest
would hurry up.
Oskar Schindler outwitted Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth. When Schindler requested
that those Jews who continued to work in his factory be moved into their
own sub-camp near the plant "to save time in getting to the
job," Goeth complied. From then on, Schindler found that he could
have food and medicine smuggled into the barracks with less danger. The
guards, of course, were bribed, and Goeth never was to discover it, though
Oskar Schinder was arrested twice ...
the point when his ambitions have been realized and he could walk away
from the war a rich man while "his Jews" die in Plaszow and
Auschwitz, Oskar Schindler desperately spends every penny he has bribing
and paying off Amon Goeth and other Nazi officials to protect and save his
a symbolic reversal of his earlier purpose in life, he spends all the
money he made by exploiting the labour of Jews in buying the lives of
Jews; whatever is not spent in bribing Goeth and other Nazi officials is
subsequently spent in feeding and protecting his Jews.
At his factory, situated by the work
camp of Plaszow, Nazi guards are instructed to stay on their side of the
fence and nobody is allowed inside the factory without permission from
Schindler himself. He spends every night in his office so he can intervene
if the Gestapo come.
he is arrested by the Gestapo - but is released, undoubtedly first and
foremost because of his many connections.
his factory, workers are only half
as hungry as in other camps - meals at Schindler`s have a calorie count of
2000 as against 900 in other places. When food supplies are critical,
Schindler spends great sums of money purchasing food supplies on the black
his factory the old are registered
as being 20 years younger, children are registered as adults. Lawyers,
doctors and artists are registered as metal workers and mechanics - all so
they can survive as essential for the war industry.
his factory, nobody is hit, nobody
murdered, nobody sent to death camps like the nearby Auschwitz.
were protected and saved by Oskar Schindler. In those years, millions of
Jews died in the Nazi death camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz, but
Schindler's Jews miraculously survived, to their own surprise, in Plaszow
right up to 1944. Schindler bribed the Nazis to get food and better
treatment for his Jews during a time when one of the most civilized
nations of the world was capable of systematic mass-murder.
When the Nazis were beaten back on the
East Front, Plaszow and its satellite camps were dissolved and closed.
Schindler had no illusions as to what that would entail. Desperately he
exerted his influence on his contacts in the military and industrial
circles in Crakow and Warsaw and finally went to Berlin to save his Jews
from a certain death. With his life as the stakes, he employed all his
powers of persuasion, he bribed uninhibitedly, fought, begged ...
Where no-one would have believed it possible,
Schindler succeeded. He was granted permission to move the whole of his
factory from Plaszow to Brunnlitz in occupied Czechoslovakia and
furthermore, unheard of before, take all his workers with him. In this
way, the 1,098 workers who had been written on Schindler`s list in
connection with the removal avoided sharing the fate of the other 25,000
men, women and children of Plaszow who were sent without mercy to
extermination in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, only 60 kilometers from
the liberation of spring, 1945, Oskar Schindler used all means at his
disposal to ensure the safety of his Schindler-Jews. He spent every
pfennig he had, and even Emilie Schindler`s jewels were sold, to buy food,
clothes, and medicine. He set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with
medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie Schindler
looked after the sick. Those who did not survive were given a fitting
Jewish burial in a hidden graveyard - established and paid for by
accounts have revealed that Schindler spent something like 4 million
German marks keeping his Jews out of the death camps - an enormous sum of
money for those times.
though the Schindlers had had a large mansion placed at their disposal
close to the factory, Oskar Schindler understood the fear which his Jews
had of nocturnal visits from the SS. As in Plaszow, Schindler did not
spent one single night outside the little office in the factory.
factory continued to produce shells for the German Wehrmacht for 7 months.
In all that time not one usable shell was produced! Not one shell passed
the military quality tests. Instead, false military travel passes and
ration cards were produced, just as Nazi uniforms, weapons, ammunition and
hand-grenades were collected. But still, a tireless Schindler succeeded in
these months in persuading the Gestapo to send a further 100 Belgian,
Dutch and Hungarian Jews to his factory camp "with regard to the
continuing war industry production".
May, 1945, it was all over. The Russians moved into Brunnlitz. The
previous evening, Schindler gathered everyone together in the factory and
took a deeply emotional leave of them.
He told them they were free, he was a fugitive."My children, you are
saved. Germany has lost the war." He asked that they didn't go into
the neighboring houses to rob and plunder. "Prove yourself worthy of
the millions of victims among you and refrain from any individual acts of
revenge and terror". He announced that three yards of fabric were to
be given each prisoner from his warehouse stores as well as a bottle of
vodka - which brought a high price on the black market.
At five after midnight - certain that his Jews finally were out of
danger - Oskar Schindler left the factory. "I must leave now",
Schindler said, "Auf Wiedersehen".
Oskar Schindler and 1200 Schindler-Jews along with him had
survived the horrors of the Holocaust ...
Poldek Pfefferberg, the Schindler Jew who helped Oskar Schindler procure
black-market items to bribe Nazi officers with during the war, later told
he promised Schindler to tell his story:"You protect
us, you save us, you feed us - we survived the Holocaust, the tragedy, the
hardship, the sickness, the beatings, the killings! We must tell your