World War

In 1943 Anna Duklauer was working in the laundry room at Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. She didn't think she would survive very long, she was beaten regularly - her life had been almost unbearable for the past three years. 

Before the war the Duklauer family was living high in the mountains of Poland, in the ski resort town of Zakopane. Here Sofia and Julius Duklauer led a happy life, highlighted by the births of their three children, Erna, Morris and Anna.

Nestled at the foot of the Tatras, Zakopane was the most famous mountain resort in Poland. In winter, natural snow provided excellent skiing possibilities while summer months offered glacial valleys, waterfalls and mountain lakes. Zakopane was a perfect idyll with its unique flora and fauna, the old cottages blackened from the sun and surrounded by ashtrees.

The Duklauer family's feelings of security collapsed, however, when in 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror. The Duklauer family was herded into Cracow's Jewish Ghetto into a one-room apartment and then torn apart. Morris was about 14, blond and blue-eyed, looking like a Christian. He had a chance of surviving, so the family told him to escape out of the ghetto.

He did, but one day he came back. "He said he missed us too much", said Anna. "When the Nazis found him they beat and dragged him off to a truck." Anna's mother Sofia ran after her only son and climbed onto the truck. Anna never saw them again ...

In 1942 Anna, Erna and her father were sent to the forced labor camp of Plaszow. Here the conditions of life were made dreadful by the SS officer Amon Goeth, the commandant of Plaszow. Goeth had made the final "liquidation" of the Cracow ghetto and had experience at three death camps in eastern Poland, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. 

Amon Goeth passed his mornings by using his high-powered, scooped rifle to shoot at children playing in the camp - he often would use it as an incentive to work harder. As Anna Duklauer later told:"Goeth was a monster ... I saw him just shoot people who didn't say the right thing."

"When you saw Goeth, you saw death," said Poldek Pfefferberg, Schindlerjude.

Then one day in the laundry, in the spring of 1943, she was approached by a small Jewish man who told her he needed women to work in the factory. Oscar Schindler`s factory. "I don't know why I was chosen that day," she later said, "It's a question I've asked myself hundreds and hundreds of times. Why me ? Why was I chosen to live ?" 

At first, Anna did not want to go and leave her sister Erna. "But she begged me. `Go. With Schindler, there is life. You must go`", Anna later said.