If you've ever seen Schindler's List, you may recognise these towers. They're in the background of many of the scenes that take place at the Plaszow Concentration Camp, next to the villa of Amon Göth, one of the most sadistic creatures ever to slither out of the Nazi regime.
As an example, here's Liam Neeson portraying Oskar Schindler, looking up at Amon Göth's villa. The towers can be seen next to it. Alas, the villa itself is long gone.
(Screenshot from Schindler's List)
I try to keep my blog apolitical, because I think there's enough politics on the internet already, but I don't think disagreeing with the Nazi regime is too much of a controversial take. At least, it shouldn't be.
Of course it goes without saying that I don't take online political discourse seriously anyway. I've been told I'm a woke lefty socialist for saying we should be nice to everyone, including women, and I've been told I'm a far-right Nazi for saying that we should be nice to everyone, including men. Social media is the toilet cubicle wall of the internet. It makes for some amusing reading while you're taking a poo at Wetherspoons but that's it.
But the holocaust is something that should be taken seriously, taught in great detail, and really thought about. I am of the opinion that everyone should visit Auschwitz, and really take in the reality of it. Or to go a step further, everyone should have an authentic concentration camp experience. Two weeks spent being treated exactly like an inmate, spending every day miserable, hungry, smelly and lice-ridden but secure in the knowledge that at least you'll be able to leave it all behind and go back to your regular lives, while knowing that many couldn't.
As you can probably see, this area was originally a quarry. The locals have mined limestone here for hundreds of years, the earliest activity being as far back as the 14th Century. But it wasn't until 1873 that the industry really exploded. A man of Jewish descent named Bernard Liban began quarrying for limestone here, and by the end of the 1890s his company was one of the most important suppliers of building materials in Krakow.
And I happen to have found a mugshot of him.
(Photo not mine, obviously.)
Unfortunately for this once prosperous quarry, its history took a turn for the worse in 1942 when the Nazis built the Plaszow Labour Camp right next door. Until that point, Krakow's Jewish population had gradually lost all of their basic human rights and been crammed into a tiny walled ghetto that was essentially an open air prison. But when the Plaszow camp opened, anyone in the ghetto who could work was taken there for slave labour. Anyone who couldn't was shot or sent to Auschwitz.
This quarry was subsequently used for slave labour, employing around eight hundred involuntary workers who quarried limestone for fourteen hours a day without breaks or days off, perpetually and indefinitely until they died of exhaustion or were shot for underperformance, or simply because Amon Göth felt like it. Survivors later told how seventy female prisoners were forced to pull five lorry loads of stone for 4km uphill in a freezing cold winter. Photos do exist to confirm this sort of treatment, taken secretly by a factory supervisor named Raimund Titsch
(Photo not mine, obviously)
In 1944, when it became apparent that they weren't going to win the war, the Nazis made an effort to cover their tracks. The remaining prisoners were sent to Auschwitz to be disposed of, and the entire camp was dismantled. Any dead bodies here were burned, along with any incriminating paperwork.
After Plaszow closed, this quarry was still used, albeit this time with a workforce of 110 consenting employees. Although how anyone could comfortably work in a place with such a dark history is beyond me. It would be like trying to raise a child in Jimmy Saville's former house. Why would you even want to attempt it?
In 1986 the limestone source was declared exhausted, and the quarry closed. It remained abandoned until Spielberg came along and used it for Schindler's List in 1993.
The tops of these towers are all mostly level with the upper shelves of the quarry, with precarious walkways that allow the casual urbexer to access them and try not to die in the process.
It's a long way down!
The floors bent under my footsteps. I tried to hold on to the railings only to find that they were loose too. My survival instinct started piping up, which was a nice surprise. I'd forgotten that I had one.
So let's talk about this place before I die!
For those who don't know, "Schindler's List" is a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, adapting the book "Schindler's Ark," by Thomas Keneally, which is itself based around the real-life people Oskar Schindler, Amon Göth and the Jewish people that fell into their orbit during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
In America, Thomas Keneally had met a man named Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg, and his wife Mila, who had both survived the Holocaust after being imprisoned at Plaszow. Poldek had made it his life mission to tell the story of the Nazi that had saved him, his family, and a thousand others. Keneally agreed to write the story, and this ultimately took them around the world interviewing other survivors. Spielberg was also interested because the very concept of an altruistic Nazi was quite the hook.
Oskar Schindler was an imperfect character. He was a charmer, a womanizer, an adulterer, opportunist and an absolute alcoholic. His initial motivations were purely economic. Because Jews could be paid less than non-Jews, Schindler simply saw them as the perfect employee. But throughout the course of the movie he became increasingly disgusted with the Nazi treatment of the Jews, and sought to save as many as possible by employing them, since those who could work would not be put to death.
The towers are connected via walkways but these have all started to fall away.
Steven Spielberg had actually been reluctant to take on Schindler's List, but agreed to it when he heard that the media had started Holocaust deniers seriously. Even during production the film sets were subject to bigoted vandalism, and the actors dealt with some people being gobby little shits. Ben Kingsley apparently came close to punching someone.
I wish he'd done it.
It's an uncomfortable movie to watch, but it is supposed to be. All suggestions for dialling back the brutality were actually opposed by holocaust survivors themselves, who wanted the reality of what they lived through to be recognised. If it makes you uncomfortable, good. At least you can switch it off. They didn't have that luxury.
The movie does portray a realistic account of the holocaust, albeit in a relatively small area. Of course, the holocaust is far too broad a topic to cover in a single movie. But this shows it from the personal perspective of those who were there, which I think is actually more powerful. We know that millions of people were murdered for being different, but the human brain is just not able to comprehend such large numbers. When we see ordinary people with names, faces, personalities and loved ones have their entire lives upturned for no reason, it's more impactful.
The weight of production was very real too. Spielberg had to have regular phone calls from Robin Williams to lift his spirits, and he also forbade small talk, jokes and banter on set, so that the actors maintained reverence to what they were depicting. Consequently the tension on set was like a pressure cooker, where emotions couldn't be naturally diffused through light hearted conversation. It's said that when Oskar Schindler broke down in tears at the end, those were Liam Neeson's actual tears. The script had called for a simple goodbye between Schindler and his workers, but experiencing genuine emotion from the role, Liam Neeson just broke down on camera and improvised an entire unscripted monologue about how he could have done more.
In regards to realism, Liam Neeson actually watched videos of Schindler speaking so that he could learn his mannerisms and intonations. Likewise, Ralph Fiennes put so much effort into becoming Amon Göth that when Mila Pfefferberg met him on the set, she began trembling uncontrollably, because he reminded her too much of the real guy.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
He looks a bit like Ryan Reynolds if Ryan Reynolds was a grumpy twat.
In actual fact, Amon Göth is one aspect of the holocaust that they actually diluted for the movie, because to capture him genuinely would have come across as gratuitous and pornographic. Even so, the movies Diet Göth was still a monster. While war brought out the best in Oskar Schindler, the opposite can be said for Amon Göth. The Nazi regime just gave him the excuse to be an absolute sadist. He regularly took casual shots at random Plaszow inmates from the balcony of his villa, seemingly out of boredom. It's said that he wouldn't even have breakfast until he'd shot someone. If one inmate tried to escape, he'd shoot ten, and sometimes if he felt like it, he'd have an inmate strung up by their feet and have his dogs maul them as they hung upside-down.
According to his mistress, Ruth Kalder (nicknamed Majola by Amon Göth), she was able to persuade him to stop shooting random people by depriving him of sex. But according to survivors this only worked for a couple of days. He liked shooting people more than sex.
(Ruth Kalder and her daughter. Photo not mine, obviously)
Many say Ruth Kalder was wilfully ignorant of what was going on, turning up her music when she heard gunshots, and acted like she was living in a resort. She described her lifestyle as that of a queen with Amon Göth as her king, lording over the filthy people, although she did expressed regret in later years, and she did intervene when Amon Göth attempted to rape his involuntary maid Helen Hirsch. Nevertheless she loved him, and even changed her name to Göth after the war, saying that if he'd not been lynched for his crimes they would now be married. Her granddaughter, a half-cast woman due to a Nigerian father, wrote a book called "My grandfather would have shot me."
I'm totally going to look that up.
As you can see, the walkways don't connect the ground to these towers efficiently but it's still possible to get onto them.
This one feels even more rickety. Looking forward to seeing if I'm still alive in a couple of hours.
Schindler's List begins in the early days of the Nazi occupation of Poland. We see ordinary people get abused on the street, their harassment being completely legal and even encouraged. They lose their businesses and their homes, and they're eventually shoved into a ghetto, that only those with employment passes are allowed to leave, such as Schindler's employees. Schindler employs them in an enamelware factory, seemingly to save money, but with signs of indifference pretty early on.
With the construction of the Plaszow labour camp in 1942 and 1943, the ghetto was liquidated. Anyone who could work was taken to Plaszow. Anyone who couldn't was shot. The body count in real life was about two thousand. In the movie, this scene was originally intended to be a lot shorter, but Spielberg deliberately dragged it out. The Jews didn't get the shorter version so neither do we. In the movie, it is witnessing this event that melts Schindler's heart and motivates him to help Jewish people.
Oskar Schindler, when faced with the weeping cyst on the rectum of humanity that was Amon Göth, set about becoming his best friend, so that he could better charm him into accepting bribes for his workers.
As the Germans begin losing the war, Göth was ordered to ship his remaining workers to Auschwitz. At which point Schindler composes a list of Jews that he wants to buy in one last ditch attempt to save as many as possible.
Sure enough, Schindler manages to have 1,100 Jews transferred to his Brunnlitz factory near his hometown. But the women are accidentally sent to Auschwitz, and Schindler has to bribe Rudolph Hoss for their freedom. Many on his list are elderly, crippled, ill due to the conditions they've been living under, and children, all of which the Nazis would consider unfit for work and therefore killed. Schindler actually lies about their capabilities and what they can do in order to "employ" them and save them.
And his factory becomes more of a sanctuary. They're under the guise of producing munitions for the war effort, but Schindler was actually purchasing munitions from other companies to pass off as his own products. He ran out of money in 1945, just as Germany surrendered.
Schindler gave a brief speech to the guards, saying that even though they were ordered to shoot the prisoners, they could choose to go home as men and not murderers. After they stand down, Schindler stayed with his workers until midnight, whereupon he made a tearful goodbye and drove off into an ambiguous future.
Check out these steps. Most of them have fallen away.
The girl graffiti is pretty cool.
Despite being mostly factual, Schindler's List does take some artistic liberties. While the vast majority of the events are real, it is ultimately a movie with a Hollywood structure and a Hollywood ending.
The script was adapted from Thomas Keneally's book, but it needed several redrafts to make it compact enough for the screen.
The truth is, Oskar Schindler didn't have an instant change of heart over witnessing the Krakow Ghetto getting liquidated. In reality, his change in attitude was gradual and difficult to pinpoint. He had a background in espionage that gave him some friends in high places, and as a result he actually knew of the upcoming ghetto liquidation, and had his employees sleep at his factory so that they would be safe.
But the movie script called for a more concrete turning point.
Just beyond the towers are these old hoppers. In the movie these aren't as obvious as the towers, since they're set further back, but they can still be glimpsed occasionally.
(Screenshot from Schindler's List)
This ladder is a bit more stable than the ones on the tower.
Other differences in Schindler's List between the script and reality were quite minor. Helen Hirsch, played by Miss Honey from Matilda, was not the only Jewish woman serving as a maid for Amon Göth. Also living in the household was Helen Sternlicht. Because they were both named Helen, Amon Göth just named them Lena and Susanna. Helen Sternlicht wasn't in the movie, but rather the movie version of Helen Hirsch goes through a blend of the two women's experiences. Likewise, some of the experiences of Itzhak Stern were the experiences of another man, Abraham Bankier.
I personally don't like this change. I understand it's easier for Hollywood to merge two people into one being, but in this case it's a tad disrespectful.
The shower scene in Auschwitz has also been scrutinised by critics as well as holocaust survivors, because there's no way these victims would have known that they were going to get gassed, and even if they did, the showers weren't where it happened. The women entered the showers, thinking that they are about to die, just to have the suspense broken by the realisation that it was just a shower. It feels more like a Hollywood moment to some.
Emilie Schindler, in my opinion, also deserved a bigger role in the movie. The movie depicted her as just being a wife fed up with her husbands infidelity. And I'm sure she was. But she was also something of a co-conspirator with Schindler, even helping him back in his pre-war espionage days.
(The real Emilie Schindler at the end of Schindler's List, paying respects to her husband.)
The movie also doesn't mention Schindler's procurement of workers from the Goleszow mines of Auschwitz, and that would certainly have left an impact. A train crammed full of people was shunted around Eastern Europe for two weeks without food or water during the bitter Winter of 1944, and eventually came to Schindler's factory purely because the Nazis didn't know where else to put it. They told Schindler that if he didn't take them, the passengers would all be shot. Schindler and his workers accepted but found the carriage frozen to the point that the locks needed breaking off. Many of the prisoners inside were dead or dying. Some were actually stuck to the frozen walls of the carriage, and Schindler's employees had to pour warm water over them to unstick them.
While the Nazi officials ordered the dead burned, Schindler argued for a dignified burial, and his wife Emilie established a makeshift hospital in the factory where she cared for those who were still alive.
As a testament to how the Schindler's were pulling the wool over the eyes of the Nazi regime, among the sick was Leosia Korn, a young woman who been retrieved from Auschwitz. She had scarlet fever and weighed less than 44kg. She was put to bed among the boilers at Schindler's factory where Emilie Schindler nursed her back to health with black market food and medicine. Schindler's documents list her as a metal worker, but she was only able to get out of bed one day before the Germans surrendered.
Perhaps the biggest inaccuracy put forward by the movie is the creation of the list itself. You see, Schindler didn't make it. Schindler was actually in jail at the time. In fact he was in and out of jail quite frequently. The movie showed him arrested briefly for kissing a Jewish woman, but this actually happened twice, and it was never Amon Göth who got him out of trouble. Rather it was his other contacts from his mysterious past in espionage.
Amon Göth was arrested in 1944 for the theft of Jewish property, which "legally" belonged to the German state. They discovered that he had been accepting bribes, and Schindler was arrested too as part of their investigation. It was a chap called Mietek Pemper, who worked as Amon Göth's unwilling secretary, who alerted Schindler in jail to the coming closure of the Plaszow camp and as such the transfer of the inmates to Auschwitz. Under instructions from Schindler, Mietek Pemper put one list together, but this somehow got into the hands of a shiftier man named Marcel Goldberg who made some alterations. While Schindler had requested his own employees be put on the list, Marcel Goldberg took to taking bribes to keep people on the list, and made a small fortune as people bid for their freedom.
(Mietek Pemper. Photo not mine, obviously)
Despite the fact that Schindler's list dictation was a work of fiction, the Jews that he mentioned weren't. Go back and listen, and have a google. Many of them are researchable. For example, they mention the Feigenbaum family. Lutek Feigenbaum broke his glasses in Plaszow, but Emilie Schindler went out of her way to procure him new ones on the black market. He also lost his sister to cancer, but thanks to Schindler, she had a dignified death at the Schindler's factory, instead of in a concentration camp.
An interesting omission that would perhaps ruin the small-scale intimate impact of the movie is the number of additional Jews that Schindler saved indirectly. He saved something like 1,200 in his own factory, but he also set a trend for Labour camps opening in Moravia, and as a result other Nazis ended up moving Jews to Labour camps from places where they would have no doubt been murdered. So in an indirect way, Schindler saved more than his original list. Itzhak Stern put the number as high as 20,000, which is pretty incredible. As Stern says in the movie, there will be generations because of Schindler.
Among the Schindler survivors and their ancestors are artists, doctors and scientists, although this shouldn't be read as disparaging to those who aren't. A life is worth saving purely by being a life. But what I want to point out is that these are people who have added to the world, rather than take from it. The world would be worse off if a collection of small-minded bigots had their way. And that's always something to keep in mind. You never know if the person you're blathering hate about might end up taking care of you someday.
Looking out from the towers, we can see this structure sticking out from the trees. This is also visible in Schindler's List, in the scenes where Amon Göth is chilling out on the balcony with his rifle.
(Screenshot from Schindler's List)
As you can see, it has a big ramp leading up it. It's still there, hidden under the jungle.
The structure it still mostly intact, and a bit sturdier than the towers.
Naturally, I had to climb this too. The lack of ladders wasn't an issue.
Here we are up on top. There's a little bit of graffiti up here but nowhere near as much as there is on the towers. I guess fewer people make the effort to scramble up here.
The truly interesting thing about Oskar Schindler is that he was such an unlikely hero. Poldek Pfefferberg described him as "All-drinking, all-black-marketing, all-screwing, but he got Mila out of Auschwitz so to me he is God."
Emilie Schindler said that he had a big heart, was affable, kind, extremely generous and charitable, but at the same time not mature at all. He constantly lied and deceived her, and later returned feeling sorry like a boy caught in mischief, asking to be forgiven one more time.
Little seems to have changed throughout Schindler's life. Even before the age of twenty he had a reputation for loving girls and hating responsibility. At the factory, Poldek once caught him skinny dipping in the factory reservoir with a young SS lady. He just couldn't help himself. He even had two illegitimate children who he named Emilie and Oskar Jr, after himself and his wife. It just seems utterly bonkers that a man would name his illegitimate daughter after the wife that he was cheating on.
But bizarrely, Emilie didn't seem to mind. She laughed about it in interviews, saying "You can fight against one but not against ten or a hundred women, so you're better just swimming with the current."
Oskar Schindler also had a background in espionage. In fact he was spying on Czech railway infrastructure as far back as 1935. Several months before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was actually arrested for espionage, and if they Nazis hadn't invaded he'd probably have been executed.
(Oskar Schindler. Photo not mine, obviously)
It's worth mentioning that Poland was invaded after a false flag operation. like the Gulf of Tonkin incident and (some believe) 9/11. In this case, it's not a conspiracy but a documented fact. The Gleiwitz Incident in 1939 involved a number of Nazi officers disguising themselves as Polish soldiers and murdering some people in a German radio station, and then broadcasting anti-German messages in Polish. This incident sparked the outrage that Hitler used to justify invading Poland.
But what makes this really interesting is that Amon Göth's lover, Ruth Kalder, claimed in 1983 that Oskar Schindler was the one who obtained these Polish uniforms for the Nazis during his espionage days.
If that's true, then it's monumental and explains so much! Schindler likely didn't see genocide being an outcome of such a menial task like obtaining a few uniforms. But it was, and he must have lived with that guilt. Everything he witnessed the Polish Jews going through, he blamed on himself for facilitating the invasion. His actions make sense now. No wonder he was an alcoholic. I'd be an alcoholic too.
(Ruth Kalder on Amon Goth's balcony with the dog he used to maul his inmates. Photo not mine, obviously)
Of course, Ruth Kalder's testimony can be disputed. She has defended Amon Göth in the past, proving that even cancer can be loved. But she was friends with Oskar Schindler. In fact Schindler introduced her to Göth as part of his scheme to befriend the maniac.
Either way, by all accounts, Schindler was certainly an alcoholic, hedonistic, adulterous boy in a mans body. But somehow that just makes him fascinating. War often brings out the worst in people, but it brought out the best in Schindler. Emilie Schindler went on to say "he'd done nothing remarkable before the war and nothing remarkable after. He was fortunate that in the short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who had summoned forth his deeper talents."
She never understood why he abandoned her in 1957, but she never stopped loving him.
I think if anything can be taken away from the story of Oskar Schindler, it's that humans aren't black and white. We're nuanced. We aren't perfect but that doesn't make us evil, and that's important to remember because we so often judge others based on what they get wrong, even if that comes with a plethora of good. Schindler proves that you can be extremely flawed and still help your fellow humans when it's required. He may have believed in Germany annexing land, but that doesn't mean he wanted to see a whole group of people eradicated.
And ultimately, the saying goes "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" and the Nazi regime had plenty of good people who did absolutely nothing. Schindler, for all his flaws, did something.
At the base of the towers there are little roofed sections, presumably for storage. These can also be seen in Schindler's List. The boy makes his way down from the villa, having been pardoned by Göth. As he walks away, he walks past the towers, and these little canopies can be seen.
(Screenshot from Schindler's List)
Not sure what any of this stuff is in the tower base.
(screenshot from Schindler's List)
The road of headstones is long gone from the real Plaszow site, but here the set pieces can still be found.
But that's it for the set of Schindler's List, casually rotting away in a long abandoned quarry.
Despite its historic inaccuracies, Schindler's List is still hard hitting and powerful, and absolutely worth watching.
The holocaust remains one of the most fascinating eras of human history, in my opinion. It's important to talk about it, even when it makes us uncomfortable. It's supposed to make us uncomfortable. If you don't like it, then you can still do something to stop it happening again. Remember, it didn't start with gas chambers and mass executions. It started with the "othering" of people. Most people are the same really, just trying to make it from one day to the next.
I will be covering more Holocaust stuff during my stay in Poland, including Auschwitz itself, which will make it unique on a blog predominantly about urbex. But first I need a break, so my next blog will be something light hearted.
In the meantime, if you like my blogs then follow me on the hub of human misery, Facebook. I try to keep my page positive. Very rare for Facebook, I know. I'm also on Instagram. However I'm a big believer that we should try to populate lesser-known social media platforms, where we see who we've chosen to follow, and aren't being manipulated by algorithms, so feel free to follow me on Vero, Bluesky and Cara too!
Thanks for reading!
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