After visiting the death camp at Auschwitz in the morning, I spent the afternoon visiting Schindler's Factory and museum. The story was made famous in the film "Schindler's List", which I have yet to see but told myself that I would. The former location of the enamel factory is now a museum, and the museum covers the Nazi occupation of Krakow and the fate of the Jewish population, who were forced into a ghetto made outside the city before many were sent away to camps. Some of the population worked at the factory.
When Germany invaded and occupied Poland, German Nazi party industrialist Oskar Schindler took over the enamel factory. When he discovered the treatment of the Jewish people in Krakow, he risked his life to protect the lives of over 1,200 Jewish workers and evade the Nazis.
The museum starts with a series of short videos that visitors can watch that depict ordinary life and the rise of the Nazi occupation in Krakow.
There was a lot of information in the museum to read. The floor tiles in a couple of the large rooms actually had the swastika design.
Street names and other public buildings had their names changed to German spellings and to glorify the leader of the party.
A large part of the musum was for the fate of the Jewish population. There was a little room with items from a Jewish household, and the items became abandoned when the families were forced to live in the ghettos. Many families would have to share a house.
Schindler's desk was on display in one room, and there was information on how the pots and pans were created from metal before being coated in enamel. One video shown in the museum featured workers who told their stories working for Schindler's factory.
There was a section of the museum to appar as a Jewish home in the ghetto with Jewish places of business.
Outside the museum are the gates of the old factory. The factory was taken over when the Soviets invaded.
Entrance to the museum also included entrance to a pharmacy inside the area that was formerly the Jewish ghetto. (This area of Krakow is not walled off, but a part of the ghetto wall can still be seen, and this area is known as Kazimierz.) The pharmacy includes information about some of the people who lived in the ghetto and their lives.
The square outside the museum contained a lot of empty chairs, and these symbolise the families crammed inside a small area. This square is called Ghetto Heroes Square.
The pharmacy had exhibitions mainly about real people and other information about the Jewish population of Krakow.
The museum was interesting to understand the occupation years of Krakow and the fate of the Jewish population, including the enamel factory and Schindler, the man who helped save the lives of over 1,200 Jewish people. Schindler's motto was "Whoever saves the life of one, saves the world entire." This is displayed on the front of the museum.
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