Journey to Poland: students memorialize Schindler factory
Dana Lorien Fey
Staff Writer

As he walked down a street in Krakow, Poland, Zachery Kleinsasser, Cottage Grove, Minn. senior, thought that something was wrong.

On a trip in 1999 to Holocaust-related sites, he saw that Oskar Schindler’s factory, made famous by the movie “Schindler’s List”, was indistinguishable from the surrounding buildings. “The guide said, ‘Here it is,’ and it shocked us...there was nothing to designate the factory,” Kleinsasser said. He decided to see if he could change that.

The efforts of the last two years are finally bearing fruit for Zack. In May, he and a group of Albion students and professors will travel to Krakow. There, they will place plaque on the factory that once served as a haven for hundreds of Jews trying to avoid persecution by Nazi Germany.

According to Frank Frick, professor of religious studies, the plaque, inscribed in English, Polish, and Hebrew, will recognize those efforts to save Jewish lives during the Nazi occupation of Poland and World War II.

Six students will make the journey to Poland, as well as four members of the faculty. According to Geoffrey Cocks, professor of history, the students making the trip include members of every grade as well as a variety of majors; including two Holocaust Studies majors. Many of the students were also a part of the first trip two years ago that inspired Kleinsasser.

“I am very impressed with the students who took this on,” Cocks said. “It is an honor to go back and do something now, no matter how small.”

The trip will also include two other important stops. The first, at Wroclaw, is a 26-acre German Jewish cemetery. Alma College students have made maintaining and restoring this cemetery one of their projects. The cemetery had fallen into disrepair after World War II, as there were no German Jews left in the area to maintain it. The group from Albion will meet the group of Alma students and spend four days restoring the site.

After working in the cemetery, the Albion students will continue on to Krakow for the dedication of the plaque on Schindler’s factory. Descendants and relatives of Oskar Schindler, as well as of the Jews that he saved, have been invited to the ceremony. “Hopefully, we will have as many people there as possible,” Kleinsasser said. The group will end their trip with a visit to the site of Auschwitz.

Donations by students and faculty that will be used to fund the plaque for Schindler’s factory are welcome and can be directed to Cocks, Frick, or Kleinsasser. They can also be donated during an upcoming fundraiser in March. According to Cocks, the trip is an opportunity for every Albion student to take part in preserving something of lasting importance. “We are commemorating an act of bravery in a time of savagery.”