Schindler Factory
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A substantial exhibition about Kraków/Poland under Nazi occupation during WWII, housed in what used to be the administrative building of the legendary enamel factory of Oskar Schindler, immortalized in the Spielberg movie “Schindler’s List”. His story is also covered in the museum’s permanent exhibition but forms only a small part of it. The exhibition style is very visual, with plenty of life-size mock-ups/installations, and at the same time rammed full with information, on static panels as well as on multimedia screens, and it can be a bit daunting if not overwhelming to try and go through it all. I would presume most visitors will be more selective (like I was when I visited in January 2024).
>Combinations with other dark destinations
More background info: The enamel factory at this location already existed before WWII, founded as it was in 1937 by three Jewish businessmen. Ownership of the company, then called “Rekord”, changed repeatedly, financial difficulties persisted and in mid-1939 it became insolvent. After the beginning of WWII and the arrival of the German Nazis, the company was put in the trustee hands of Oskar Schindler. He was from the Sudetenland in what was Czech territory until in 1938 Hitler annexed the region, which was home to many ethnic Germans, like Schindler. The annexation was also provided for by the infamous Munich Agreement. But back to the factory and Oskar Schindler:
Schindler initially only leased the factory, it wasn’t until 1942 that he became the actual owner of it. The company was renamed “Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik” (German enamelware factory) or “DEF” for short, which became the logo stamped on to the enamel products manufactured here. Schindler expanded the factory and later also added the production of military equipment, such as shells and artillery fuses as well as mess tins for soldiers in the field.
Initially most of the employees were still Poles but after the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in neighbouring Podgórze in March 1941 (see Eagle Pharmacy and Kraków), workers were increasingly recruited from there and marched every day from the ghetto to the factory and back, escorted by police.
After the liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943, those still able to work (and not killed during the liquidation or sent to the death camps) were transferred to Płaszów. However, Schindler, himself a member of the Nazi party as well as the military intelligence (“Abwehr”) and apparently a talented wheeler-dealer, used his connections to negotiate the establishment of a sub-camp on premises he had purchased that were adjacent to his factory. That alone put the inmates/workers in a far better position than at Płaszów. The number of Jews employed by Schindler went from a mere hundred in 1942 to over a thousand by 1944. The majority of Schindler’s workforce were Jews but Poles were also still employed, mostly in administrative jobs, and contact with these was beneficial for the Jewish employees. There was also a medical service and food was significantly better than at Płaszów.
In August 1944 an Allied plane, on the way back from a mission supporting the Warsaw Uprising, crashed into the camp by the factory and the Jewish workers were transferred to Płaszów after all, and henceforth had to walk from there to the factory and back (a far greater distance than to the former ghetto). Not much later, however, this concentration camp was also liquidated as the Red Army closed in. For the same reason, Schindler relocated his factory to Brünnlitz in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), insisting on taking his workers with him, some 1200 in total. The new sub-camp established for them at Brünnlitz became part of the administration of Groß-Rosen. Yet this move saved Schindler’s workers from the death marches or extermination within the General Government, a fate suffered by most of the inmates of the camps there.
In March 1945 the Red Army liberated the Brünnlitz camp and the factory closed. Schindler left the Czech lands in May 1945, but his ex-employees provided him with a letter stating what he had done for them. He stayed in touch with his former employees who, in a return of favours, supported him financially. For a while he emigrated to Argentina (in good old Nazi fashion) and ran a farm there, but soon resettled in Germany.
Yad Vashem later awarded Schindler the title “Righteous Among the Nations” for his saving of so many Jews – exactly when this recognition took place is a bit unclear, the museum booklet says as early as in 1963, but the USHMM website says 1993. Delving into the Yad Vashem database revealed a possible explanation for the discrepancy: it says that in 1962 (not 1963) a tree was planted in Schindler’s honour at the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations (see under Yad Vashem), but it says that the actual title was awarded him posthumously in 1993. In fact Schindler visited Jerusalem and the Yad Vashem site numerous times from 1961 onwards and for a while lived in Israel part time (but also continued to live in Germany).
After he had died in Hildesheim, Germany, in 1974 his wish to be buried in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem was fulfilled. Thanks to the recognition by Israel and the witness testimonies of his former employees, Schindler’s story became recognized worldwide and a book about him led to the screen version that became an international blockbuster, namely Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie “Schindler’s List”.
His former enamel factory in Kraków was nationalized in 1947 by the new communist regime imposed on Poland by the Soviet Union. Production shifted to telecommunication components under the company name “Telpod S.A.”. Some alterations to the site were made but many of the original structures survived unchanged. The company operated at the ul. Lipowa location until 2001/2002, when it moved to a different site near Kraków where it is still in business to this day.
The old Schindler factory premises were taken over by the City of Kraków in 2005 and discussions began as to what should be done with the now defunct plant. In 2007 it was decided to divide the premises between two cultural institutions. One became the present museum, opened in 2010, and run under the auspices of the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, while the other became the MOCAK modern art museum (see below), opened in 2011 and housed in parts of the former production halls of the ex-factory.
The WWII-themed museum in the former administrative block has been a major success and is now the most significant site related to this subject in Kraków. Its popularity comes with the downside of elements of over-tourism (though not as much as at Auschwitz). Even in the most off-season you can go, like when I went in mid-January 2024, I found the place a bit too crowded at times.
What there is to see: quite a lot! Some may even say too much. It really is a very rich exhibition inside, both visually and with regard to content that is almost overwhelming.
Note from the outset that this is not a museum specifically about Oskar Schindler and his famous List (as the erroneous labelling on e.g. Google Maps may lead you to believe!). That aspect does feature here but forms only a small part of the exhibition, almost like an afterthought. Even the exhibition’s official name “Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945” is a little too narrow, as topically it actually begins before the war. But let’s look at the various sections one by one:
From the ticket counter you have to proceed to the staircase (or lift) up to the first floor, where the exhibition begins. It starts a bit oddly with a kind of recreation of a photographic studio to introduce images of Kraków and its residents from the period of 1918 to 1939.
Dominating the next room is a large “stereoscope”, a circular structure with stools around it from which you can view “stereo” photographs, i.e. dual images creating an illusion of being three-dimensional. Apparently the stereoscope dates back to the late 19th century, but what is shown here relates to the Anschluss of Austria to the Third Reich, as kind of a prologue of what is to come. In addition there are photo albums you can leaf through, cinema and theatre posters as well as screens with multimedia material all showing a peaceful city before disaster struck. A hint at the latter is represented by the display of weapons and gas masks – from the Air and Gas Defence League.
Behind this room is a large cinema hall where material including interviews with survivors/eyewitnesses (and/or their descendants) are shown. As far as I remember these are mostly in Polish (or Hebrew) but are subtitled in English.
The exhibition as such is also bilingual throughout, in Polish and with mostly decent enough translations into English (the odd slip or grammatical mistake notwithstanding).
After leaving the cinema hall and re-emerging into the room with the stereoscope I was initially confused as to where the exhibition continued and first found myself back in the intro section and nearly headed back down the stairs. But on closer inspection I found the narrow passageway leading to the next thematic section. This is a recreation of a railway station waiting room and the topic here is the mobilization of August 1939 which saw railway stations heaving with people as the ominous anticipation of war grew.
The outbreak of the war is the next topic. In addition to artefacts (such as German Wehrmacht steel helmets) and text-and-photo panels there is also a speaker installation providing a soundscape of air raids and fighting. Another large exhibit that comes next is a replica of a wrecked TKS “tankette”, i.e. a small tank-like vehicle of the Polish army that was easily outgunned by the Germans.
The beginning of the Nazi German occupation of Poland is signified in the exhibition by a corridor plastered with official announcements and declarations by the new masters – and two large Nazi swastika flags. Also covered is the formation of the “Generalgouvernement” (‘General Government’), i.e. the parts of Poland under German occupation and administration but not formally annexed to the Third Reich as such (like e.g. Łodź, which was renamed Litzmannstadt). Kraków was to become the administrative capital of this territory with Hans Frank at the helm, who took up his office in the Wawel Castle (see under Kraków).
The next section, called “City Square”, describes the worsening living conditions in the first few months of the occupation. Especially affected was the large Jewish community (once 25% of Kraków’s population). At the same time German street names appeared (the central square, Rynek Główny, became – surprise, surprise – Adolf-Hitler-Platz) together with German books and Hitler portraits popping up in shop windows. The dominating exhibit in this part is a mock-up of the front of a Kraków tram of the time (you’ll later see the inside of the vehicle too) with a sign on the side barring Jews from using the tram. An authentic artefact on display nearby is a remnant of the Grunwald monument that the Nazis destroyed in late 1939.
There follows a special section about the “Sonderaktion Krakau” (‘special operation Krakow’), a round-up of academics of the Jagiellonian University in November 1939, when the Gestapo interrupted a lecture in which the Nazis’ approach to science and higher education was to be discussed. The attendees soon found out the answer to this the hard way: the were arrested and first held in a local prison before being sent to the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Exhibits here include university benches and a professor’s chair (original). The adjacent room sports another life-size exhibit: a police lorry of the sort that the victims of this operation would have been carted off to prison in.
After this follows a section on the “General Government”, the new Nazi German administration of this part of Poland that was occupied but not integrated into the Reich (see above). Apart from a model rostrum, this section is dominated by large-scale photographs, a multimedia presentation about various German institutions, as well as drawings and Nazi plans for the rebuilding of parts of Kraków and the renaming of squares and streets.
The next section is entitled simply “The Terror” and provides details of the various forms of repression, round-ups, interrogation involving torture, etc. (cf. Pomorska). On display are torture instruments, a “poster of death” listing the names of those selected for public execution, as well as personal belongings and secret letters of victims. Part of this section involves a row of symbolic small prison cells. Down a flight of stairs you come to a closed prison door.
A kind of bridging section follows that is about “everyday life 1940-1941”, focusing on rationing, the black market and official regulations. Here you also see the mock-up of the tram again, this time from the inside (the windows mostly covered with propaganda posters).
The next section called “Railway Station” is about the various roles the Kraków main station played in not only moving people but also military equipment, especially once “Operation Barbarossa” (Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR) had started. Again there’s plenty of photos and also a propaganda film featuring governor Hans Frank. Part of this section is also the large staircase leading down (and then straight back up) whose walls are plastered with signs with names of streets where Jewish citizens had lived before they were moved into the newly created ghetto. The staircase featured in the film “Schindler’s List”, yet it is not originally from the time of Schindler’s enamel factory but was constructed after the war.
At the end of the first floor is a section entitled “The Plunder” which deals with the movement of Jews into the ghetto and the concomitant theft of their belongings by the Nazis. This is exemplified by a jumble room full of goods including clocks, menorahs, silverware and paintings.
Now you climb the stairs to the second floor where the first section is the “Labour Office” (‘Arbeitsamt’). This covers the forced labour that both Poles and Jews were subjected to, including at Schindler’s factory, as well as the “Baudienst” (‘construction service’) devised not just to see to repairs and construction work but also to simply keep people busy so they wouldn’t have too much time to think, basically.
Next comes a section entitled “Planty Garden Ring” which is about everyday life in this park-like ring of greenery around the Old Town. The main exhibit here is a film projector (looking like a large funnel), inside of which a German newsreel was supposed to play, but at the time of my visit this wasn’t working.
After this it gets a lot darker still, also literally: only gloomily lit narrow corridors are lined by a fake ghetto wall (like the one you can still see in Podgórze – see Kraków). This section is entitled “The Ghetto”. Along the first stretch of ghetto wall are panels and small video monitors set into the wall, followed by life-size mock-ups of cramped living quarters inside the ghetto. These are brought to “life” by several full-scale mannequins of ghetto inhabitants – all in plain white, but with suitably dejected facial expressions. Then you come back to the ghetto wall, now from the other side and the wall is left plain. At the end of the corridor is an installation symbolizing the liquidation of the ghetto in March 1943: a heap of furniture, mattresses and even a hobby horse – items the Nazis often threw out of the windows into the streets below (sometimes together with elderly victims) during the clearing of the ghetto.
There follows another section called “everyday life” now between 1941 and 1943. This was the time of the German invasion of the the USSR – and unsurprisingly the discovery of the Katyn massacre of Polish military leaders by the Soviets plays an important role here (see Katyn Museum, Warsaw).
The next section is, finally, about Oskar Schindler and his enamel factory “Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik” (DEF). A main exhibit here is Schindler’s reception desk, while there are examples of enamel items bearing the DEF imprint as well as information panels about the life of Oskar Schindler.
The adjacent room is what was Oskar Schindler’s office. The main feature here is his imposing desk standing in front of a map on the wall of Europe ca. 1940. The other main element in this room is a large art installation consisting of a glass cube filled with dishes and pots in raw metal, i.e. before undergoing the enamelling process. Inside the cube along rounded walls are listed the names of all those Jews saved by Oskar Schindler. On interactive screens you can “meet” such survivors giving witness accounts.
Then the exhibition leaves the Schindler story behind again and moves on into another section entitled “City Square II”. This is about the role of the Catholic Church, cultural institutions and street life. One event covered here is the arrest by the Gestapo of some 200 artists who were then sent to Auschwitz.
Also part of this section is another life-size mock-up, this time of a “Conspirer’s Flat”. A quite ordinary kitchen and dining room reconstruction including lots of illegal papers and documents dotted about. There’s also a life-size mock-up of an underground printing press.
Along the following corridor the topic of “Liquidating the Ghetto” returns, now mostly represented through photos.
At the end of this corridor you come to the entrance of a circular room representing the concentration camp “KL Płaszów”. Along the curved wall large-scale images of the camp and the adjacent Liban quarry form the backdrop to two large exhibits: one is a quarry bogie like those used at Liban, the other the actual camp’s main gate. I’ve read in one source (this – external link, opens in a new tab) that this is the authentic gate. That claim is not made by the guide/leaflet to the exhibition, which is otherwise quite detailed. So I’m not sure that claim of authenticity is correct.
At the end of the second-floor exhibition part you then descend the rear staircase down two floors to the ground floor in the east wing of the building. The walls of the staircase are lined with Nazi propaganda posters.
At the bottom, the first exhibition room on this floor you encounter is a rather odd thing: “At the Barber’s”, including the display of original hairdressers’ equipment. Apparently it was a kind of place where people would talk about the events of 1944 (e.g. the attempted assassination of the General Government’s police chief).
“The Basement” comes next, consisting again of mainly life-size reconstructions of shelters in which people were living – and hiding, especially during the Nazis’ response to the Warsaw Uprising. In addition there’s also a mock-up of a bunker of the sort that the Germans tried to fortify Kraków with as the Red Army drew closer.
The “last months of Occupation”, including the final public execution on 15 January 1945, are then followed by “the entrance of the Red Army”. The former includes some quirky nativity scenes. One involves three figurines, one of whom is Hitler, plus another Nazi (Hans Frank perhaps?), as well as a Mr Death taking aim at Hitler. Another is a scene of a round-up of Jews and the third has symbolic Three Wise Men, one of whom clearly looks like Stalin! The next room even has a shrine-like frame around a large portrait of Stalin. I wouldn’t have expected this sort of thing in a Polish museum!
The final part in this wing is the “Room of Choices” a space intended for “reflection”. There’s a circular installation with walls and three columns set inside them covered with war-time quotes in various languages. Juxtaposed are representations of action or non-action and (lack of) empathy. The question you are supposed to ask yourself here is “how would I behave in such a situation”. There’s no way of knowing until you are actually in some such situation, so any answer prompted here has to remain entirely speculative. That’s why I’m not fond of such didactic impositions.
You then walk through a covered passageway that runs parallel to the main gate, behind it, and from here you can peek into the courtyard and see the other former factory buildings (now largely occupied by the MOCAK; see below).
Back inside the building’s west wing is the last part of the exhibition. There’s a piece of equipment from the enamel factory and a wall of faces – of those saved by Oskar Schindler (just like on the outside by the entrance). A medal of the Righteous Among the Nations, as awarded to Oskar Schindler, (see above) is on display too.
And then you come back to the entrance and can either leave straight away or first go back past the ticket desk and museum shop and maybe to the café where there are also a few additional displays. A room to the side is for showing temporary exhibitions (but I did not go in).
All in all, this is a difficult place to arrive at a clear verdict for. On the one hand the exhibition is certainly often visually impressive, though some of the installations feel a little for the sake of it. There’s also a plethora of information and a good number of artefacts, authentic and reconstructed. The mass of stuff to take in can feel a bit overwhelming for some visitors, while others will probably love it for its full-on visual richness. The organization of the exhibition, which you have to follow in a pregiven circuit (no deviating from that is possible), can at times be a bit puzzling, and the succession of elements occasionally seems a bit confused (especially at the beginning and the end). The fact that the role played by Oskar Schindler is only such a small element here, may raise criticism too (I encountered precisely this myself from someone who reported back after visiting a few months after my own visit – and I found it hard to disagree).
However, unbeknownst to me at the time, the adjacent MOCAK (see below) has its own special exhibition about the life and deeds of Oskar Schindler, so that could make up for the dearth of info about this in the Schindler factory exhibition. I wish that would have been pointed out at the exit. Then I might have gone there straight away afterwards.
Location: in the middle of the Zabłocie part of Podgórze, a district of Kraków south of the Vistula River, ca. a mile and a half (2.5 km) south-east of the central square Rynek Główny. Address: ul. Lipowa 4, 30702 Kraków.
Google Maps locator: [50.04744, 19.96165]
Access and costs: a bit out of the centre, but not hard to get to; not so expensive.
Details: If you have the time (and mobility/stamina) you could walk it. From the Rynek Główny in the heart of the Old Town it takes about 35-40 minutes, via Kazimierz.
The nearest public transport option is the train station Kraków Zabłocie just up the street from the museum, where regional trains stop a short ride south from the main trains station. More frequent are the trams that go to Podgórze (e.g. line 3 or 24) from where it is a short walk, along Kącik and then through the tunnel under the train line leading straight to the western end of ul. Lipowa.
Opening times: Tuesday to Thursday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Friday to Sunday until 8 p.m., Mondays only from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; closed every first Tuesday of the month as well as on a number of special days (consult the muzeumkrakova website for dates). Last admission 90 minutes before closing time.
Admission (as of early 2024): 36 PLN (some concessions apply); free on Mondays (but limited number of tickets).
There are combination tickets available under the label “memory trail”, which includes the Schindler factory as well as the nearby Eagle Pharmacy plus the Pomorska Street Memorial. As this costs only 47 PLN it’s worth it even if you want to visit only one of those two other sites.
Note that it can get very busy in the exhibition and so you may have to queue or wait until you’re admitted – it can even happen that no tickets are available any more if you just turn up. To avoid this possibility you can buy tickets in advance online for a specified time slot (see bilety.mhk.pl). However, the ticketing website does not seem to include the option of buying one of those combination tickets for all three sites on the “memory trail”. Online tickets are available only until one day before the slot selected. And there is always a contingent of tickets held back to be sold on-site. These in turn are only available for the day of purchase, i.e. you cannot turn up and buy a ticket for a later day. Given this set-up I’d recommend booking online in advance in the busier months, but in the off-season period you can probably rely on getting a ticket at the site and then take advantage of the combination ticket, if you wish to see one or both of the other sites on the “memory trail”; and that would give you the option of spreading your visits to these sites over seven days! If you want to choose that I’d recommend going to Pomorska first, as that is by far the least busy of the three sites.
Time required: The museum website recommends a minimum of 90 minutes. I spent a bit over two hours there, and if you want to read absolutely everything then I’m sure you can spend a lot longer still, half a day perhaps.
Combinations with other dark destinations: the nearest other site covered here is the Eagle Pharmacy in Podgórze, an easy walk away to the west. There are combination tickets available to all three sites under the label “memory trail”. In addition to the Schindler factory and the Eagle Pharmacy this also includes the Pomorska Street Memorial to the north-west of the city centre. You already save some money if you combine your visit to the Schindler factory with one of those other two sites, and of course even more if you go and visit all three. The ticket is also valid for seven consecutive days, so you can spread your visits out nicely.
The direct neighbour of the Schindler museum, the MOCAK (see below) not only occupies other parts of the former enamel factory but also occasionally has temporary extra exhibitions that can be of interest from a dark-tourism perspective, such as one about war cartoons; plus since October 2023 there has been an extra exhibition about the life and work of Oskar Schindler himself (see above) that is apparently permanent. I’ll have to check this out next time I’m in Kraków.
Podgórze is also worth a look in itself, especially for the ghetto wall fragments on ul. Lwowska and the ghetto monument on Plac Bohaterów Getta.
For more see under Kraków in general.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: Right next door, and occupying parts of the former Schindler enamel factory, is a major cultural institution: the MOCAK, which is short for Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (open Tue-Sun 11-19h, 25 PLN). The exhibitions shown are said to be often quite provocative and risqué and politically charged.
The neighbourhood (Zabłocie) has seen, and is still seeing, a lot of redevelopment or ‘revitalization’, and in addition to the two museums there are now several new(ish) bars and restaurants, food trucks, a large food court hall and a variety of specialist shops, all indicating a certain level of gentrification of what was once a comparatively drab industrial area.
See also under Kraków in general.
