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.
I was trying to hide and figure out when the action will be over, I can go to my friends in the city, and stay outside, and eventually this way I can help my wife who will be in the camp. But they were going from house to house with two dogs, and they was trying to trace all the Jews who were hiding, and I saw, hiding behind a special wall, what I was thinking will be good protection, but that later on, I found out it will be not a good protection against the dogs, I saw them pulling a woman and a child. They shot the woman and they killed the child by sli...taking the child by the legs and hitting the wall. Then I decide to step out and I knew that pro...probably, my last minutes of my life, but I didn't want to kill, be killed over there in the hiding place, and I decide to figure out how I can protect myself. And I know a little bit mentality of the soldiers, of, and the officer, that they, when somebody gets some order and fulfill the or...order, then they have to respect it. So I start to take the bundles what were laying all around on the street and put them on one, in one place, and when they came to me close enough, about four or five feet, I turned to them, and in German, reported to them that I was appointed here by one of the officer to clean the road so that the thoroughfares will be open. There were no cars there, there were not horses, there was nothing there. They start to laugh, but they figure out, the guy just got the order, so he's doing the order, so he told me in German, "Verschwinden!" This means, "Get lost." I didn't run, I turned around, clicked with my heels, and slowly left, don't even turning my head behind, because I knew when I turn my head, maybe will, will, will get a bullet in the back of the head.
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