Brnenec, Czech Republic – An industrial site in ruins in the Czech Republic where the German businessman Oskar Schindler Saved 1,200 Jews during World War II return to life.
The site, an old textile factory in the city of Brněnec, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) east of Prague, was stolen by the Nazis of its Jewish owners in 1938 and became a concentration camp. This weekend he welcomed the first visitors to the Museum of Survivors dedicated to Holocaust and the history of the Jews in this part of Europe.
The opening was timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was also in May 1945 that Schindler received a gold ring from grateful Jewish survivors, made with gold taken from his teeth. The ring was inscribed with the Hebrew words of Talmud, saying “who saves a life saves the entire world.”
Schindler’s story was told in the Oscar de Steven Spielberg Oscar, “Schindler’s list.”
Daniel Löw-Beer was a driving force behind the project. His predecessors lived in this part of the Czech Republic for hundreds of years, acquiring the plant in Brnenec in 1854 and turning it into one of the most important wool factories in Europe.
“We had to flee for our lives, we lost a bit of our history, so return a little history to a place and, hopefully, bring to light the story of Oskar Schindler and the village is what we are doing today,” Löw-Beer told The Associated Press.
Today, their family members are scattered worldwide. “I am pleased to put a little, of course, emotionally, of my family in the place because they were survivors. My grandfather lived here, my father lived here, and then the world was broken one day in 1938,” he said.
The museum, located in part of a renewed spinning factory, shows the story of Schindler, his wife Emilie, the Löw-Beer family and others linked to the area, together with the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors. It includes a space for exhibitions, conferences, film and concert projections, as well as coffee.
A transparent glass wall between this part and the largest area and even in ruins behind it separates the present and history.
“It is a universal place of survivors,” Löw-Beer said. “We want those stories and people to make their own opinions.”
In 2019, Löw-Beer established the Arks Foundation to buy the warehouse and turn it into a museum, investing money and renewing an association with the local community to revive the careless site.
The regional government contributed funds, while a subsidy of the European Union brought children from five European countries to Brněnec to create ideas that helped shape the museum’s design.
The official opening of the weekend completed the first step, but much remains to be done. The remaining buildings are still waiting to be completely restored. They include the Schindler office where the City Council plans to create an information center, the barracks of the SS troops, which will provide more exhibition spaces and the entire Schindler Ark building, where Jewish prisoners lived and worked.
Currently, the museum is not open daily and focuses on educational activities for schools.
The previous projects to restore the site failed due to the lack of funds. In contrast, the Arks Foundation adopted a step by step approach. When local resident skeptics could see that something really was happening this time, they offered help. A company came with a large truck loaded with bricks, dropped them and simply left, said Löw-Beer.
“We wanted to show that you have to do something for something else to happen,” said Milan Šudoma from the Foundation. If the organizers had waited until they had obtained all the necessary funds, nothing would be done now, he said.
“Oskar and Emilie Schindler are proof that a person can make a difference,” says the museum quotes Rena Finder, one of Schindler’s Jews. “Everyone said there was nothing I could do. And that is a lie because there is always something you can do.”
Schindler, an unlikely hero, was born in the nearby city of Svitavy (Zwittau in German) in what was then Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, with a German -speaking majority and a substantial Jewish population.
A Svitavy museum said Schindler was a mass of contradictions: a joy, a womanizer, a spy for the Germans, a Nazi but also a man who saved the people of the Holocaust.
After the war broke out in 1939, Schindler moved from Svitavy to Krakow, now Poland, where he directed an enamel and ammunition plant and treated Jewish workers well. With the Red Army approaching in 1944, he created a list of Jewish workers who said they were necessary to reassure the plant in Brněnec.
When a transport with 300 women was diverted to the Nazi extermination field in Auschwitz, Schindler managed to ensure his release.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem, said it is the only known case “that such a large group of people were allowed to leave alive while gas cameras were still in operation.”
In another bold act, Emilie Schindler led an effort to save more than 100 Jewish prisoners who arrived at a nearby train station in sealed cats sealed in January 1945.
In 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Emilie and Oskar Schindler as righteous among the nations, the honor granted to those who rescued the Jews of the Holocaust.
