Schindler

At Schindler`s enamelware factory DEF Anna worked 12 hours a day, alternating her time between making pots and pans and working in the kitchen preparing meals. But she was away from harassment and the killings. At Schindler`s factory, nobody was hit, nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps. Conditions at the factory were far from comfortable. Freezing, lice-ridden inmates still suffered typhus and dysentery. 

Yet by manipulating the black market, Schindler managed to provide them unthinkable luxuries: He spent a fortune greasing the palms of powerful SS men and bribed the Nazis to get food and better treatment for his Jews, rudimentary medical care, safe corners where a rabbi could usher in the Sabbath, a decent burial ground for the Jewish dead. He even let his Jews bake Passover matzohs in the factory ovens. 

In those years, millions of Jews died in Polish camps like Auschwitz, but Schindler`s Jews miraculously survived in Plaszow right up to 1944.

The Nazis ordered Schindler`s factory shut down, and he had no illusions as to what that would entail. Desperately he exerted his influence on his contacts in military/industrial circles in Cracow and Warsaw and finally went to Berlin to save his Jews from a certain death. With his life as the stakes, he employed all his powers of persuasion, he bribed uninhibitedly, fought, begged. 

Where no-one would have believed it possible, Schindler succeeded. He was granted permission to move the whole of his factory from Plaszow to Brunnlitz in occupied Czechoslovakia and furthermore, unheard of before, take all his workers with him. In this way, the 1,098 workers who had been written on Schindler`s list in connection with the removal avoided sharing the fate of the other 25,000 men, women and children of Plaszow who were sent without mercy to extermination in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, only 60 kilometers from Plaszow.