Fabryka Emalia Oskara Schindlera, Kraków

The industrial complex on Lipowa Street is Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, once a metal-products works and now home to museum institutions. Notice the entrance façade: its restrained, functional character suits a place built for production rather than display. The story began as Rekord, an enamelware and sheet-metal firm founded by Jewish entrepreneurs in nineteen thirty-seven.

After the business failed, Oskar Schindler assumed control during the German occupation, renamed the operation Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik, or DEF, and directed it until nineteen forty-five. Here, industrial labour became inseparable from survival. Schindler employed Jews facing extermination, and people included on the Schindler list were saved from the Holocaust.

During the occupation, the workforce grew to about eleven hundred Jewish people. As the eastern front advanced, Schindler and his accountant Itzhak Stern compiled the list that enabled more than eleven hundred prisoners to be moved to the factory at Brünnlitz. The administrative building now presents Kraków under German occupation, while the former workshops also accommodate the Museum of Contemporary Art.