Helena Borská

“The Schindler´s factory in Brněnec was a former Löw-Beer thread factory. I am used to knit a lot and also nowadays you can find threads with the ʻmade in Brněnecʼ sign. In the court of that factory we found loads of remaining pieces of yarns and threads. Since we were allowed to use those pieces, we started to knit our clothes out of them. Men made us knitting needles and we began to dress ourselves into: trousers, dresses, underwear, sweaters... Those were all about 30 cm long pieces, which we tied together and knitted. That was such a cheerful side of it all.”

“The commander of our "camp", of the 1,200 people who were there, Leibhold, he was a really bad guy. But not in a way he would shot people down. He requested discipline and punished people when they were doing something against his rules. At times he punched or kicked someone, what he considered to be reasonable. I heard there was an order to liquidate us; Russian prisoners of war were already digging graves for us. But Schindler rescued us. There were many rumors about him - that he was in American intelligence service; we glorified him, we regarded him as the almighty one. However it is also a fact, that everything he had done, he achieved thanks to money, which he mainly had from Jews. They hoped the money might have redeemed their lives. Schindler sent a fake telegram to Leibhold, that he was called out to an important meeting in Prague. He left and he could not return back, thus this way Schindler saved our lives. The order to liquidate us never came true.”