Ludmilla was born to an assimilated Jewish family in Kishinev, Romania. She and her mother, a physician, were living in Poland when the Germans invaded on September 1, 1939. They were taken to Krakow. Ludmilla was forced to live in the Krakow ghetto; her mother was sent to the Warsaw ghetto. Ludmilla worked in a factory at the Plaszow labor camp for a businessman who was a friend of the German industrialist Oskar Schindler. In October 1944, Schindler attempted to save some Jewish workers by relocating them to a munitions factory in Bruennlitz, in the Sudetenland. Ludmilla was among those on Schindler's list to be relocated. She and about 300 other women were detained briefly in Auschwitz before reaching Bruennlitz. There, some of the workers sought to sabotage the production of munitions. Ludmilla was liberated in early May 1945.5.
Well, we, there was no safety under German occupation. There was no safety because these people had, they were torturers, murderers, there was no, no logic in it, no reason in it, this was just pure hatred and pure murder all the time. But Schindler assumed that if his workers were work for the war effort, and he changed it, in Bruennlitz, he changed his production to a production of shells, from enamelware. Because he had to prove really, because they to, arrested him twice because they didn't think that he was working for the air, war effort, and so on. So we were doing, making shells, and we were supposed to polish these shells. But all the production was faulty because we on purpose were sabotaging this, you know, they were never as they ought to be. You know, always was something flawed, flawed in those shells during our months in Bruennlitz. And this is how he could save us, proving that his factory was indispensable for the war effort.
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