Oskar Schindler's Factory

In front of you is the office building of Oskar Schindler's former enamelware factory. Schindler, a Sudeten German industrialist and Nazi Party member, came to Kraków after the invasion of Poland in 1939 and took over a small bankrupt factory on this street. He renamed it Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik, known as Emalia, and made enamel kitchenware and, later, military supplies too.

1From business to refuge

He employed Jewish workers from the ghetto, at first because they were cheap. Over time, and especially after the ghetto was liquidated in 1943, Schindler used his position, his contacts and a great deal of bribe money to protect them: he arranged for his workers to be housed next to the factory, away from the regime of the Płaszów camp.

In the autumn of 1944, as the Soviet army advanced, he moved production to Brünnlitz in Moravia, with a list of about 1,200 Jewish workers. Most of them survived the war. In 1993, Yad Vashem recognised Oskar and Emilie Schindler as Righteous Among the Nations. Their story reached a wide audience through Thomas Keneally's novel (1982) and Steven Spielberg's film (1993), partly shot in Kraków.

2A museum about the whole city

Since 2010 the building has housed a branch of the Museum of Kraków with the exhibition 'Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945', which tells the story of Poles and Jews during the war, not just Schindler's. If you want to take this history further, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum lies about 60 kilometres away, outside this route.

3What to look for

• The portraits in the windows, photographs of the factory's workers.
• The gateway under the canopy, the original entrance to the works.
• The surrounding sheds, remnants of the Zabłocie industrial district.