In 1941, Ludmilla and her new husband Leopold were imprisoned in the Kraków ghetto in German-occupied Poland. In 1943, the couple was transferred to the Plaszow labor camp. There they were subjected to grueling conditions and arbitrary violence. In fall 1944, businessman Oskar 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. En route to Schindler's factory in Brünnlitz, Ludmilla and about 300 other women were imprisoned briefly in Auschwitz. Thanks in part to help from Schindler, Ludmilla survived the Holocaust and was liberated in early May 1945. After the war, Ludmilla and Leopold remained friends with Schindler and shared the story of their rescue.
He was a very tall man. A little, I would say, kind of broad-shouldered. Very blond. Very blue-eyed, and had this air of, of, such goodness emanating from him. I remember later on when we were in the camp which he established in Sudeten at the very end of the war, you know, we were always freezing when we saw a German because it meant that either there will be shooting or there will be beating or there will be some other kind of, of, of, torture, moral or physical. But he, when he came, all we could see was Herr Direktor. We used to call him Herr Direktor, and he smelled awfully good, you know, and he was always dressed beautifully, and always dropping cigarettes all over, he was smoking a cigarette, and then put butts around so the people could pick it up and smoke it, because, of course, they didn't have any cigarettes.
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