The Labor Office at Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory Museum in Kraków

​The Oskar Schindler Enamel Factory Museum in in Kraków honors and documents the history of the  German businessman Oskar Schindler who saved a thousand Jews from death by giving them gainful employment and preventing them from being sent to an extermination camp.  

​The permanent exhibition titled "Kraków – the Occupation Period 1939–1945," also tells the history of occupied Kraków and what it was like to live in that city during its occupation by the Germans during World War II.

←The Germanization of  Kraków’s Market Square
                                         Ed Knab photo 

​Thousands of photographs and artifacts of the city of Kraków, its inhabitants,  streets, shops, the military might of the German Reich and everyday life of what Kraków looked like as an occupied city is on exhibit. It also shows the total and complete subjugation the Polish and Jewish people had to endure throughout the occupation: the racial discrimination against Jews, the terrors against the Polish intelligentsia and the deportation for forced labor that faced anyone who was unemployed.

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     On the second floor of the museum is a small room given the title of Labor Office.  It is plain and looks innocuous enough belying the fact that the Labor Office, the Arbeitsamt in German, was among the most feared institutions established by the Germans in occupied Poland. It assigned jobs to the unemployed and everyone had to be employed in the interests of the Germans either in Poland, in any territories of Poland annexed into Germany, in any country occupied by the Germans or in Germany itself. 

   ↑ Filing cabinets in Labor Office in museum         ↑an example of personal file of forced laborer          Ed Knab photo                                                            sent to work through the German  labor office                                                                                               in Kraków. IPN photo.

Will ye, nill ye, everyone had to work for the benefit of the Third Reich under penalty of death or being sent to a concentration camp, often one and the same. Men were separated from their families. Adolescents girls as young as 14 were sent alone without protection. Women with small children were not exempt. All were torn from their homes and forced to work, oftentimes under horrendous conditions, in agriculture or industry, wherever they were sent.  

 German bureaucrats registering Polish workers for  labor  in Kraków 1940

 Polish women lined up to register for labor in Kraków labor office. 1940

A poster at the museum describing the events of forced labor in that city states: “By June 1943, approximately thirteen thousand people were deported from Kraków itself with approximately 31,000 deported from the Kraków county district.”

Written for Women's History Month in remembrance and honor of the women of Poland  who suffered as forced laborers in Nazi Germany during World War II.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more about this particular event in history please see: Wearing the Letter P. Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany 1939-1945. Hippocrene Books, Inc. indiepubs.com/search?type=product&q=sophie+hodorowicz+knab