A Trip to Oskar Schindler's Factory in Krakow

Maybe even guess how it felt, though true empathy is doomed to failure. How can anyone fully grasp the emotions piqued by such incomprehensible circumstances?

We'd trekked through an underpass and along a back-street to find it. People had worked here. People still did. Whole families had been saved here. Heroic actions had been wrought from seemingly unlikely sources. Inordinate kindness and compassion in profoundly ordinary surroundings.

It looked like a factory - it was a factory - in the industrial part of the city. But that frontage is so famous. Spielberg brought his camera crew here to film the exterior shots. Even if I hadn't seen it already from a dozen history books, I'd have known it from that.

This is where those poignant, daring scenes from Schindler's List had played out in reality.

For Oskar Schindler, this was a recipe for wealth beyond his wildest dreams. His contacts in the Third Reich ensured that he grabbed the best contracts. His bottom line was boosted by the on-going carnage of the Second World War. Particularly when he secured a deal to provide enamel goods for the German military. The riches kept on rolling in.

At its peak, Oskar Schindler's Factory employed in excess of 1,750 people. Around a thousand of them were Jews.

Schindler's bribes to his Nazi cohorts were initially to boost that ratio. There were strict guidelines regarding how many Jews could work for any company. After all, they were the desirable ones, due to the fact that they were effectively slave labor.

But Han Franz - the Nazi Governor of Krakow - had wider concerns than the net profits of a local businessman. He had to keep the Polish economy going, which required the Poles to be working too. Plus he was ultimately working towards the Final Solution. Entrepreneurs would be the first to moan, when their entire staff had been deported to the gas chambers.

Schindler's lavish gifts, which included hard to find black market goods, allowed him to edge the quota up. It wasn't altruism. It was business. More Jewish workers boosted his profits and rendered his company far more competitive than his rivals.

Each time officials attempted to snatch back any one of his workforce, Schindler forced an exemption. A quiet word here, a present there, the threat of involving a superior elsewhere. His network of contacts allowed him to do such things.

Yet even as late as 1940, Oskar Schindler was still supplying information to the intelligence agencies. In the autumn, he even traveled into Turkey to expose corruption amongst German ambassadors there!

Two years later, he was using those skills - and the factory - to benefit the other side. He visited Budapest to talk with Jewish resistance movements, providing information and testifying as an eye-witness to atrocities. He used his business as a cover to sneak funds and other supplies to the same in Poland.

Most significantly of all though, Oskar Schindler built his own work camp within the confines of his factory grounds. Here all of his own Jewish workers, plus hundreds from a nearby factory, were housed.

While their peers were deported to Płaszów concentration camp, or worse to Auschwitz and Belzec, those Jews in the Schindler work camp were safe. They were well fed, received medical attention and were even allowed to observe their religious rites.

It took all of Oskar Schindler's resources to pull off such a feat. He pulled every string, called in every favor, and spent thousands that he'd made in financing bribes.

At least three times, various authorities became suspicious of his activities and he was arrested. Influential Nazi officers stepped in to secure his release, their compliance oiled by yet more bribes.

By July 1944, those same contacts were able to tip Schindler off about the changing tide of the war, and plans for the extermination of all Jews involved in work not vital for the war effort. Schindler deftly changed the whole modus operandi of his business. His company switched to manufacturing anti-tank grenades solely to safeguard his Jewish workforce.

Even that wasn't quite enough. But Schindler had received enough warning to act.

He reached into the very last of his coffers, and asked favors of his high-ranking Nazi friends to the very limit of his credibility. With suspicion raging all around him, and the Red Army advancing fast, Schindler secured the necessary permissions to relocate his work camp entirely to his native Czechoslovakia.

In doing so, Oskar Schindler managed to save 1,200 Jews from the gas chambers. They all survived, healthy and whole, until the end of the war.

My friend and I were quite unsure what to expect within the former premises of the enamelware factory.

We paid our entrance fee because we wanted to see where all that history had happened. It never occurred to us to find out what the factory is today.

The fascinating Museum of Wartime in Poland is contained within its sprawling rooms complex.

It certainly seemed popular. The entrance hall was bustling with tourists and school parties. Uncertain about the etiquette of Polish queues (there isn't one, you just push in until you reach the desk; pushiest person wins), I stood for a good while at the cloakroom counter trying to check in my coat.

Fortunately, we appeared to have timed it just right at the cafe next door. There was a lovely, sustaining cup of coffee, before we went to explore the building above.

There's very little remaining from the site's famous days as an enamelware factory. The walls, rooms and fittings are the same, but not much else. After all, the building had been the workplace for many more companies, since Oskar Schindler arranged for his Jewish workers to be bussed from it to safety.

However, those wishing to see filming locations from Schindler's List, or touch the real history too, will find a few rooms of interest. I've described those in detail elsewhere, so won't repeat it here.

I am a historian. It's very safe for you to assume that I've visited plenty of museums in my time. I will categorically state that this was the best of them all.

It had everything. Exhibits of original artifacts; information displayed on the walls; computerized screens to delve further into facets that caught your eye; video footage; reconstructed scenes in rooms; audio testimony; interactive elements too.

Your journey through the Oskar Schindler Factory begins with a huge room, all about Krakow on the eve of World War II. You see a refined city, where an elegant, multicultural population exist peacefully side by side.

This had once been Poland's capital city. Its monarchs and saints were buried in the cathedral on the hill. Krakow was a place where the intelligentsia gathered, many of them attending one of the oldest universities in Europe.

Then Germany invaded.

Polish men and women flocked to enlist, in order to defend their city as soldiers. The English bombed ancient buildings. Nazi Occupation began in force. Dissenters were arrested, executed or disappeared. Jews were stripped of rights, homes and property, herded into the Ghetto and concentration camps, then taken for extermination. And finally the Red Army appeared on the horizon. Poland, and Krakow with it, was now a Communist state.

There is an epic tale to tell in Krakow's Museum of Wartime.

Inside the Oskar Schindler Factory, each new room or corridor has something new to fascinate and inform. The museum doesn't set out merely to explain what happened. It wants to take you there.

Even now I still get goosebumps, remembering how I wandered down a staircase to encounter a black door locked at its foot. A sturdy door, lined with bolts, and too thick to easily break down. The whispers and sobs from within. A man's agonized moan. A women's hushed, urgent voice repeating words in a cadence that could only have been a prayer. And a peep-hole that I feared to look through.

The Wartime Museum of Krakow is designed to bring moments of history to life, and it fully succeeds at that. Visit it, and give yourself three or four hours to fully explore its mysteries and treasures. You will not be disappointed.