Oskar Schindler’s former factory in Brno – Schindler’s Ark

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Oskar Schindler’s factory moved from Kraków to the industrial complex in Brno in 1944. He also took his Jewish workers with him, whom he saved from death in concentration camps. In total, approximately 1,100 people worked here, including several children.

The factory in Brno in the Svitavy Region , made famous by Steven Spielberg ‘s Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List , will be turned into a memorial named Ark in the coming years. Its construction will be co-financed by the director’s foundation, but mainly by the Löw-Beer family, which owned the factory before the war.

The value of the building complex of the former Löw-Beer textile factory lies in the tangible evidence of the Gross-Rosen-Brünlitz concentration camp from the 1940s, the main bearing of which are the buildings around the assembly area with the entrance gate.

Camp Gross Rosen

The current buildings are only a fraction of the extensive premises of the former textile factory in Brněnec. The most valuable buildings that have the most direct historical connection with the branch of the Gross Rosen concentration camp in Brno (it was located in the northern part of the area in the 1940s) are three preserved buildings : building No. 23 (laboratories), building No. 5 (spinning mill), chemical warehouse, house No. 29 (warehouse, office) and entrance gate. The buildings surround the camp assembly area on three sides. Mainly Polish Jews worked

in the munitions factory . Most of them came from the Krakow ghetto. The fact that they got a job in Brno saved their lives. They thus avoided the death transports to Auschwitz.

A planned Holocaust museum

In 2019, the area came into the possession of a new owner , the Swiss Daniel Löw-Beer , the grandson of the last Jewish director of the factory, who fled the Nazis in 1938. The plan is to build a Holocaust museum here , which will also focus on the fate of the people saved by Oskar Schindler. The priority was the cleaning of the premises, the preservation of the walls and the disposal of encroached trees. Work is now underway on the actual building of the new Museum of Survivors. The first part of the complex should be made available to visitors in 2024.