Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler (April 28, 1908 - October 9, 1974) was a Sudeten German industrialist who saved his Jewish workers from the Holocaust. He saved as many as 1,200 Jews by having them work in his enamelware and munitions factories located in Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. He was the subject of the film Schindler's List.

To 1200 Jews a womanizing, heavy-drinking, German-Catholic industrialist and Nazi Party member named Oskar Schindler was all that stood between them and death at the hands of the Nazis. He remained true to 'his' Jews, the workers he always referred to as 'my children'. He rose to the highest level of humanity and gave them a second chance at life. He spent millions to protect them, everything he possessed, and eventually risked his life in desperate rescue attempts. In those years, millions of Jews were exposed to ruthless slaughter in the Nazi death camps, but Schindler's Jews miraculously survived. He earned their everlasting gratitude - today there are more than 7,000 descendants of his Jews living in the US, Europe and Israel. [1]

Early life

Oskar Schindler was born on 28 April 1908 in Zwittau-Brinnlitz, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now Svitavy, Czech Republic). He was born into a wealthy, catholic, business family, but in the 1930s his family soon went bankrupt because of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Schindler joined the Nazi Party. His parents, Hans and Louisa, divorced when Oskar was 27, the source of his resentment towards his father.

Oskar was very close to an older sister, Elfriede.

During World War II

An opportunistic businessman, he was one of many who sought to profit from the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Schindler gained ownership of a factory in Kraków from a Jewish industrialist named Nathan Wurzel. Schindler, on Wurzel's advice, renamed the factory Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik, or DEF, to manufacture enamelware. He obtained around 1,300 Jewish slave labourers to work there with the help of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern. When Stern and Schindler were first introduced to each other, Schindler held out his hand. Stern declined to take it. When Schindler asked why, he explained that he was a Jew and it was forbidden for a Jew to shake a German's hand. Schindler answered with a German expletive: "Scheiße" (a scatological term pronounced /'ʃaisə/). Stern could tell from the start that this was no Nazi. Initially Schindler may have been motivated by money — hiding wealthy Jewish investors, for instance — but later he began shielding his workers without regard to cost. He would, for instance, claim that unskilled workers were essential to the factory. Harming his workers would result in complaints and demands for compensation from the government. Schindler was arrested three times during the war, once even for just kissing a young Jewish girl on the cheek. His second arrest was by the Gestapo for black market activities. Today it is known that Schindler was an Abwehr agent.

While witnessing a 1942 raid on the Kraków Ghetto, where troops were used to round up the inhabitants for shipment to the concentration camp at Plaszow, Schindler was appalled by the murder of many of the Jews who had been working for him. He was a very persuasive individual, and after the raid, increasingly used all of his skills to protect his Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews). Schindler went out of his way to take care of the Jews who worked at DEF, often calling on his legendary charm and ingratiating manner to help his workers get out of difficult situations. Once, says author Eric Silver in The Book of the Just, "Two Gestapo men came to his office and demanded that he hand over a family of five who had bought forged Polish identity papers. 'Three hours after they walked in,' Schindler said, 'two drunk Gestapo men reeled out of my office without their prisoners and without the incriminating documents they had demanded'". Schindler also reportedly began to smuggle children out of the ghetto, delivering them to Polish nuns, who either hid them from the Nazis or claimed they were Christian orphans. He arranged with Amon Göth, the commandant of Plaszow, for 900 Jews to be transferred to an adjacent factory compound, where they would be relatively safe from the depredations of the SS guards.

Schindler's factory at Brněnec in 2004

Schindler was arrested twice on suspicion of conspiracy, but managed both times to avoid being jailed. Schindler would typically bribe government officials to avoid investigation. When the advance of the Red Army threatened to capture the concentration camps, almost all were ordered destroyed and a majority of the inmates were murdered. However, Schindler moved 1,200 "workers" to a factory at Brněnec-Brünnlitz in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in October 1944. When one shipment of his workers was misrouted to Auschwitz, he managed to have them returned to him with an extremely hefty bribe. Brněnec was captured by the Soviets in May 1945.

Schindler can be viewed as going through three stages: a first stage where he was primarily interested in making money, a middle stage where he wanted to make money, protect his workers, and be safe himself, and a third stage where he realized he would not be able to achieve all three of these goals, and chose to protect his workers.

After the war

Oskar Schindler's grave.

At the end of the war, Schindler emigrated to Argentina. He went bankrupt and returned to Germany in 1958, to a series of unsuccessful business ventures. Schindler settled down in a little apartment at Am Hauptbahnhof Nr. 4 in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany and tried—again with help from the Jewish organization—to establish a cement factory. This went bankrupt in 1961. His business partner cancelled their partnership, saying, “…now it is clear that you are a friend of Jews and I will not work together with you anymore…”

Oskar Schindler died in Hildesheim, Germany, on 9 October 1974, at the age of 66. He was buried at the Christian Cemetery at Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Israel.

No one really knows what Schindler's motives were. However, he was quoted as saying "I knew the people who worked for me... When you know people, you have to behave toward them like human beings."

Schindler commemorated

In 1963, he was honoured at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, only the third Christian so recognized. He was given an honour to plant a tree at the Avenue of the Righteous.

Schindler's story, retold by Holocaust survivor Poldek Pfefferberg, was the basis for Tom Keneally's book Schindler's Ark (the novel was later renamed Schindler's List), which was adapted into the 1993 movie Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg. In the film, he is played by Liam Neeson. The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

See also

• Emilie Schindler
• Raoul Wallenberg
• Albert Göring
• Corrie ten Boom
• Frank Foley
• Ala Gertner
• Wilm Hosenfeld
• Karl Plagge
• John Rabe
• Ho Feng Shan
• Chiune Sugihara
• Nicholas Winton
• Henri Reynders
• Schindler Jews
• Itzhak Stern
• Dimitar Peshev

Books

• Crowe, David M. Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind The List. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8133-3375-X

• Keneally, Thomas. Schindler's Ark. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. ISBN 0-340-33501-7. Republished as Schindler's List in 1993, ISBN 0-671-88031-4.

External links

• The Schindler Story
• Oskar and Emilie Schindler in Yad Washem Memorial
• Oskar Schindler's list at Auschwitz.dk
• Holocaust Rescuers Bibliography
• Oskar Schindler's grave at www.findagrave.com
• Oskar Schindler
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Special Topics: Oskar Schindler

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