BRNENEC, Czech Republic (AP) — A dilapidated industrial site in the Czech Republic where German businessman Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews during the World War II is coming back to life.
The site, a former textile factory in the town of Brněnec, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) east of Prague, was stolen by the Nazis from its Jewish owners in 1938 and turned into a concentration camp. This weekend it welcomed the first visitors to the Museum of Survivors dedicated to the Holocaust and the history of 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 golden ring from grateful Jewish survivors, made with gold taken from their teeth. The ring was inscribed with the Hebrew words from Talmud, saying “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”
Schindler’s story was told in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning movie, “Schindler’s List.”
Daniel Löw-Beer was a driving force behind the project. His predecessors lived in this part of Czech Republic for hundreds of years, acquiring the plant in Brnenec 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,” Löw-Beer told The Associated Press.
Today, his family members are scattered around the world. “I’m pleased to put a little bit, of course emotionally, of my family back in the place because they were survivors. My grandfather lived here, my father lived here, and then the world was shattered one day in 1938,” he said.
Glass wall separates past and present
The museum, housed in part of a renovated spinning mill, displays the history of Schindler, his wife Emilie, the Löw-Beer family and others linked to the area, together with the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. It includes a space for exhibitions, lectures, film screenings and concerts, as well as a café.
A transparent glass wall between this part and the bigger, still ruined area behind it separates the present and history.
“It’s a universal place of survivors,” Löw-Beer said. “We want those stories to be told and people to make their own opinions.”
In 2019 Löw-Beer set up 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 neglected site.
The regional government contributed funds, while a grant from the European Union brought children from five European countries to Brněnec to come up with ideas that helped shape the museum design.
The official opening on the weekend completed the first step but a lot remains to be done. The remaining buildings are still waiting to be fully restored. They include Schindler’s office where the town hall plans to create an information center, the barracks of the SS troops, which will provide more exhibition spaces, and the entire building of Schindler’s Ark where the Jewish prisoners lived and worked.
Currently, the museum is not open on a daily basis and focuses on education activities for schools.
Previous projects to restore the site failed due to a lack of funds. In contrast, the Arks Foundation took a step-by-step approach. When skeptical local residents could see something was really happening this time, they offered help. A firm came with a big truck loaded with bricks, dropped them and just went off, Löw-Beer said.
“We wanted to show that you have to do something for something else to happen,” said Milan Šudoma of the foundation. If organizers had waited until they had secured all the necessary funding, nothing would likely be done by now, he said.
“Oskar and Emilie Schindler are proof that one person can make a difference,” the museum quotes Rena Finder, one of the Schindler’s Jews, as saying. “Everybody said there was nothing I could do. And that’s a lie because there is always something you can do.”
A man of contradictions who saved hundreds of lives
Schindler, an unlikely hero, was born in the nearby town of Svitavy (Zwittau in German) in what was then the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, with a German-speaking majority and a substantial Jewish population.
A Svitavy museum said Schindler was a mass of contradictions: a troublemaker, a womanizer, a spy for the Germans, a Nazi but also a man who saved people from the Holocaust.
After the war broke out in 1939, Schindler moved from Svitavy to Krakow, now Poland, where he ran an enamel and ammunition plant and treated Jewish workers well. 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.”
In another bold act, Emilie Schindler led an effort to save more than 100 Jewish male prisoners who arrived at a nearby train station in sealed cattle wagons in January 1945.
In 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Emilie and Oskar Schindler as Righteous Among the Nations, the honor awarded to those who rescued Jews from the Holocaust.