‘Schindler's List' factory reopens as Museum of Survivors
The last factory Oskar Schindler operated in the Czech Republic during World War II reopened as the Museum of Survivors.
Schindler used the industrial site in the town of Brněnec, about 100 miles east of Prague, to save 1,200 Jews. His story was told in the 1982 book 'Schindler's Ark' and Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning 1993 film 'Schindler's List.' The Nazis stole the former textile factory from its Jewish owners in 1938 and turned it into a concentration camp.
The museum, dedicated to the Holocaust and the history of Jews in eastern Europe, welcomed its first visitors this past weekend, according to The Times of Israel.
The opening coincided with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Also, in May 1945, Schindler received a ring from grateful Jewish survivors, made with gold taken from their teeth, per the Times. The ring was inscribed with Hebrew words from the Talmud: 'Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.'
A man named Daniel Low-Beer was a driving force behind the project. His ancestors lived in that part of the Czech Republic for hundreds of years, acquiring the plant in Brněnec in 1854 and turning it into one of Europe's most important wool factories.
'We had to flee for our lives, lost a bit of our history, so putting a little bit of history back to a place and hopefully bringing out as well the history of Oskar Schindler and the village is what we're doing today,' Low-Beer told the Times.
In 2019, he created the Arks Foundation to buy the warehouse and turn it into a museum, investing money and renewing a partnership with the local community to revive the dilapidated site.
'It's a universal place of survivors,' Low-Beer said. 'We want those stories to be told and people to make their own opinions.'
Housed in part of a renovated spinning mill, the museum contains a history of Schindler, his wife Emilie, the Low-Beer family, and others connected to the area, along with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. It includes a space for exhibitions, lectures, film screenings and concerts, as well as a cafe, per the Times.
Schindler was an unlikely Holocaust hero.
Born in Zwittau, Austria-Hungary, what is now Moravia in the Czech Republic in 1908, he grew up in a Catholic well-to-do family with all the privileges money could buy. Schindler was an ethnic German, spoke German and considered himself a German. He was described as a troublemaker, a womanizer, a spy for the Germans, a Nazi. But also a man who saved people from the Holocaust.
An industrialist always looking to make money, Schindler moved to Krakow, now in Poland, when the war broke out, where he ran an enamel and ammunition plant and treated Jewish workers well.
After witnessing the Nazis' brutality and violence against Jews, he decided to protect as many Jewish forced laborers as he could. With the Red Army approaching in 1944, he created a list of Jewish workers he claimed were needed to resettle the plant in Brněnec.
When a transport with 300 women was diverted to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Schindler managed to secure their release.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial center in Jerusalem, said it's the only known case 'that such a large group of people were allowed to leave alive while the gas chambers were still in operation.'
Also, Emilie Schindler helped save more than 100 Jewish male prisoners who arrived at a nearby train station in sealed cattle wagons in January 1945.
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