Czech factory once home to 1,200 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler to be turned into a Holocaust museum

The old textile factory in Brnenec
The old textile factory in Brnenec

A Czech factory once used by Oskar Schindler to house the 1,200 Jews he saved with his famous list is to be turned into a Holocaust museum.

The old textile factory in the central village of Brnenec now lies in a state of rack and ruin after shutting down 12 years ago but in 1944 it was the destination of the hundreds of Jews Schindler saved from almost certain death in the Holocaust.

Schindler moved his Jewish workers there after learning that his Deutsche Emaillewarenfabrik factory in German-occupied Poland was to be closed down: an act that would have been a death sentence for the Jews.

Now, after years of negotiation, the factory belongs to the Endowment Fund for the Memorial of the Shoah and Oskar Schindler, a Czech organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and the author of the list.

“Our main goal is to get the building, actually the whole area, back to its original appearance,” Jaroslav Novak, from the fund, told Novinky, a Czech news website. “That includes watchtowers, the hospital and the concentration camp.”

He added that with the factory now in the organisation’s hands, fund-raising for the museum project could start in earnest, and that he was confident the needed money could be raised quickly given the fame of Oskar Schindler.

Blahoslav Kaspar, the local mayor, said the village had wanted the factory to become a memorial for years but legal wrangling over complicated property ownership issues had scuppered its plans.

Back in 1944 Brnenec was a small cog in the Nazi armament industry but by using a combination of subterfuge, connections and bribery Schindler ensured the factory produced little in the way of usable munitions while at the same time turning it into a safe haven for its Jewish workers.

He spent significant amounts of his own money on black-market food to supplement the starvation rations his workers received from the SS. The German also resorted to buying munitions from other factories to pass off as his own in order to keep suspicious eyes off Brnenec.

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