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.
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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