20 C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 FIONA NEWTON Landscapes of human exploitation Sixty per cent of people in the UK under the age of 35 have never heard of Auschwitz. How do we conserve the 20th century’s most dreadful heritage? Are we consistent in our celebration, commemoration or protection of uncomfortable aspects of history? How have sites which relate to a single snapshot of history been treated valued in different ways, or perhaps not valued at all? Perhaps by examining sites in a single area, held together by their involvement in one ‘story’, we can see varied levels of conservation and commemoration which typify a disparate reaction to the uncomfortable history of Nazi genocide across Eastern Europe. The state of preservation and the level of remembrance of the ghetto area and forced labour camps around the Polish city of Krakow are perhaps typical of many towns and cities in that area. Looking at sites around this city and one small story in its wartime history we can examine how successive generations are treating a harrowing history. Deutsche Emalwarenfabrik Oscar Schindler Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’ is a film based on a novel, Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally, but that in turn is a fictional interpretation of historical fact. It is an example greater than most of the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, between myth and reality. The locations that shaped the story, in truth and in Hollywood, also draw us to examine the presentation of commemoration and the preservation of this uncomfortable history. Oskar Schindler, a Sudetan German, arrived in Krakow in 1939 to make money. He was a profiteering opportunist and a member of the Nazi party with a playboy lifestyle, a flawed character who, in turn, surrendered his fortune and risked his life to save over a thousand people from certain death. Initially Schindler used his influence and panache to seek out confiscated Polish property. He established his factory Deutsche Emalwarenfabrik Oscar Schindler (Emalia) in a 1937 metalwork factory on Lipowa Street, Podgórze, and began producing enamel kitchenware for the German army. Podgórze was, and is still, an industrial area close to that which became the Jewish ghetto. Other factory owners were encouraged to move their production into the nearby Plaszów camp. Schindler was allowed, at a cost, to accommodate his workforce and production outside the camp. He bought a plot of land adjacent to the factory and obtained permission from the SS to build barracks at Emalia which met the regulations.Today there is no surviving evidence of this cramped network of barracks constructed at Schindler’s expense.The Schindler subcamp employed around 900, mainly Jewish, workers, many of whom were in truth unfit or unqualified for factory work. Their food was mainly bought on the black market and, with nutrition considerably better than that of the prisoners in Plaszów, even those Schindler Jews who were later shipped to hard labour camps, such as Mauthausan, were stronger and better placed for survival. As the war drew to an end in October 1944, Schindler moved almost 1,100 workers on ‘Schindler’s list’ to the safety of a factory at Brněnec-Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland. Since the end of the war the factory has fallen into disrepair and become home to a series of small-scale industrial uses. It has been difficult to find, a rundown building in an edge-of-town industrial area with nothing to indicate its significance. Pressure from international and local sources to recognise the central role of the site in the survival of so many has led to some restoration The 1937 metalwork factory on Lipowa Street in the Podgórze district of Krakow became Deutsche Emalwarenfabrik Oscar Schindler. It was considered a sanctuary for those who were saved from death or protected from mistreatment and starvation.
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