Leopold was a teacher in Kraków, Poland, when World War II began in 1939. Shortly after Germany invaded Poland, he met Oskar Schindler, a businessman who had come to German-occupied Kraków to get rich. The two became friends. In 1941, Leopold and his new wife Ludmilla were forced to live in the Kraków ghetto. In 1943, after the liquidation of the ghetto, the couple was imprisoned in the Plaszow labor camp. There, they were subjected to grueling conditions and arbitrary violence. In fall 1944, Schindler helped save some Jewish forced laborers by relocating them and his munitions factory from Kraków to Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland. Because of Leopold's previous relationship with Schindler, the couple was included in this group. Leopold survived the Holocaust and was liberated in early May 1945. After the war, Leopold and Ludmilla remained friends with Schindler and shared the story of their rescue.
He entered the, our apartment. My mother was very scared. She ask him what he wish, and he said, "Don't worry, I'm not here to arrest anybody. I am here to make business with you because I took apartment, a Jewish apartment, from, and I pay money for the apartment, I received it free, but I pay money to this Jewish fellow, and he said that you were in interior decorating, and you were decorating this apartment." This moment I came forwards. I knew that he is not a Gestapo officer. He was about 6 foot 2 and I was only 5 foot 8, so I looked to this guy, handsome face, young-looking, and in his early thirties or uh, late thirties. It's hard to describe his age. He look very mature, he was about 35 years old, or 34 years old, in this time. And he looks [at] me and I felt right away a closeness between him and me, and we start talking. And we became a friend right away from the first day we met. And he asked me to do some certain things to him on the market, in city, to give him, get him some goods to the, his new apartment. I delivered, he pay for it. And we became a very, very close associate together.
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