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]

Personal life

Oskar Schindler was born on April 28 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 went bankrupt because of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Schindler joined the Nazi Party.

When Oskar was 27 years old, his parents, Hans and Louisa, divorced. Oskar had an older sister, Elfriede, to whom he was very close.

Emilie Schindler

Emilie Pelzl was born on October 22, 1907, in the city of Alt Moletein, a village in the German-populated border region of what was then The Republic of Czechoslovakia.

Emilie met Oscar Schindler when he came to her father's farmhouse selling electric motors. After a courtship of six weeks, they were married on March 6, 1928, in an inn on the outskirts of Zwittau, Oscar's hometown.

Emilie worked at her husband's side throughout the war and is remembered fondly by the Schindler-Jews for her sacrifice and compassion. [2]

During World War II

Oskar Schindler is known as a man who outwitted Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other during World War II. Schindler surfaced from the chaos of madness during the Holocast, spent millions bribing and paying off the SS and eventually risked his life to rescue the Schindler-Jews.

Beginnings

After the occupation of Poland in September of 1939, the head of each important Jewish business was replaced by a German trustee, or Treuhander, and it was required that the former owner become an employee. The firms became German, and Aryan workers were brought in to replace many of the Jews.

Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten industrialist, had come to Cracow from his native town of Zwittau, just across what had been a border a few months earlier. Unlike most who rushed into Poland to take advantage of the new laws of ownership, he received a factory not from an expropriated Jew but from the Court of Commercial Claims. A small concern devoted to the manufacture of enamel-ware, it had lain idle and in bankruptcy for many years. In the winter of 1939-1940 he began operations with 4,000 square metres of floor space and a hundred workers, of whom seven were Jewish. Soon he managed to bring in Itzhak Stern, whom he'd met through a mutual friend, as his accountant.

During the first year, Schindler's labor force expanded to 300, including 150 Jews. By the end of 1942, the factory had grown to 45,000 square metres and employed almost 800 men and women. The Jewish workers, of whom there were now 370, all came from the Cracow ghetto the Germans had created. "It had become a tremendous advantage," reported Stern, "to be able to leave the ghetto in the daytime and work in a German factory."

Although Schindler's workers could not understand the reasons, they recognized that "Herr Direktor" was somehow protecting them from the deportations which had begun in the ghetto. An air of security grew in the factory and the men soon sought permission to bring in families and friends to share in their comparative haven.

Word spread among Cracow’s Jews that Schindler's factory was the place to work. And, although the workers did not know it, Schindler helped his Jewish employees by falsifying the factory records. Old people were recorded as being twenty years younger; children were listed as adults. Lawyers, doctors, and engineers were registered as metalworkers, mechanics, and draftsmen—all trades considered essential to war production. Countless lives were saved in this manner as the workers were protected from the extermination commissions that periodically scrutinized Schindler’s records.

During this time, Schindler spent his evenings entertaining many of the local SS and Wehrmacht officers, cultivating influential friends and strengthening his position wherever possible. His easy charm passed as candor, and his personality and seeming political reliability made him popular in Nazi social circles in Cracow.

Stern remained unimpressed by the air of security. From behind his high book-keeper’s table he could see through the glass door of Schindler’s private office. "Almost everyday, from morning until evening, officials and other visitors came to the factory and made me nervous. Schindler used to keep pouring them vodka and joking with them. When they left he would ask me in, close the door, and then quietly tell me whatever they had come for. He used to tell them that he knew how to get work out of these Jews and that he wanted more brought in. That was how we managed to get in the families and relatives all the time and save them from deportation." Schindler never offered explanations and never revealed himself as a die-hard antifascist, but gradually Stern began to trust him.

An "inner-office" circle formed; a group of Jewish workers close to Schindler, including Stern and his brother Nathan, along with Label Salpeter and Samuel Wulkan, (both ranking members of the Polish Zionist movement) were part of a group that served as a link with the outside underground movement. They were soon joined by a man named Hildegeist, the former leader of the Socialist Workers’ Union in his native Austria, who, after three years in Buchenwald, had been taken on in the factory as an accountant. Pawlik, a factory engineer and an officer in the Polish underground, led these activities. Schindler himself played no active role in all this, but his protection served to shelter the group. It is doubtful that these few men did effective resistance work, but the group did provide the Schindlerjuden with their first cohesiveness and a semblance of discipline that later was to prove useful. [3]

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.

Plaszow

On March 13 1943, came orders to close the Cracow ghetto. All Jews were moved to the forced-labor camp of Plaszow, outside the city. Here, in a sprawling series of installations that included subordinate camps throughout the region, conditions even for the graduates of the terrible Cracow ghetto were shocking. The prisoners suffered and by the hundreds either died in camp or were moved to Auschwitz. The order to complete the extermination of Jewry had been given and willing hands on all sides cooperated to carry out the command as efficiently and quickly as possible.

Stern along with Schindler’s other workers had also been moved to Plaszow from the ghetto but, like some 25,000 other inmates who inhabited the camp and worked outside, they continued spending their days in the factory. Falling deathly ill one day, Stern sent word to Schindler urgently pleading for help. Schindler came at once, bringing essential medicine, and continued his visits until Stern recovered. But what he had seen in Plaszow had chilled him.

Nor did he like the turn things had taken in his factory. Increasingly helpless before the frenetic Jew-haters and Jew-destroyers, Schindler found that he could no longer joke easily with the German officials who came on inspections. The double game was becoming more difficult. Disturbing incidents with these inspectors happened more and more often. The increasing frequency of incidents in the factory and the evil his eyes had seen at the Plaszow camp probably were responsible for moving Schindler into a more active antifascist role.

In the spring of 1943, he stopped worrying about the production of enamelware appliances for Wehrmacht barracks and began the conspiring, the string-pulling, the bribery, and the shrewd outguessing of Nazi officialdom that finally were to save so many lives. It is at this point that the real legend begins. For the next two years, Oskar Schindler's ever-present obsession was how to save the greatest number of Jews from the Auschwitz gas chamber only sixty kilometres from Cracow.

His first ambitious move was to attempt to help the starving, fearful prisoners at Plaszow. Other labour camps in Poland, such as Treblinka and Majdanek, had already been shut down and their inhabitants liquidated. Plaszow seemed doomed. At the prompting of Stern and the others in the "inner-office" circle, Schindler one evening managed to convince one of his drinking companions, General Schindler—no relative, but well placed as the chief of the war-equipment command in Poland—that Plaszow’s camp workshops would be ideally suited for serious war production. At that time they were being used only for the repair of uniforms. The general fell in with the idea and orders for wood and metal were given to the camp. As a result, Plaszow was officially transformed into a war-essential "concentration camp." And though conditions hardly improved, it came off the list of labor camps that were then being done away with. Temporarily at least, Auschwitz's fires were cheated of more fuel.

The move also put Schindler in well with Plazow's commander, the Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth, who, with the change, now found his status elevated to a new dignity. When Schindler requested that those Jews who continued to work in his factory be moved into their own sub-camp near the plant "to save time in getting to the job," Goeth complied. From then on, Schindler found that be could have food and medicine smuggled into the barracks with little danger. The guards were bribed, and Goeth never was to discover the true motives in Schindler's request.

Schindler began to take bigger risks. Interceding for Jews who were denounced for one "crime" or another was a dangerous habit in fascist eyes, but Schindler now started to do this almost regularly. "Stop killing my good workers," was his usual technique. "We've got a war to win. These things can always be settled later." The ruse succeeded often enough to save dozens of lives.

One August morning in 1943, Schindler played host to two surprise visitors who had been sent to him by the underground organization that the American Jewish welfare agency, the Joint Distribution Committee, then operated in occupied Europe. Satisfied that the men indeed had been sent by Dr. Rudolph Kastner, head of the secret JDC apparatus, who was at the time leading a shadowy existence in Budapest with a sizable price on his head, Schindler called for Stern. "Speak frankly to these men, Stern," he said. "Let them know what has been going on in Plaszow."

"We want a full report on the anti-Semitic persecutions," the visitors told Stern. "Write us a comprehensive report."

"Go ahead, urged Schindler. "They are Swiss. It is safe. You can rely on them. Sit down and write."

To Stern the risk was purposeless and foolhardy, and he flared up. Turning angrily to Schindler, he asked, "Schindler, tell me frankly, isn't this a provocation? It is most suspicious."

Schindler in turn became angry at Stem's sudden mistrust. "Write!" he ordered. Stern had little choice. He wrote everything he could think of, mentioned names of those living and those dead, and penned the long letter that, years later, he discovered had been circulated widely and helped to settle uncertainties in the hearts of the prisoners' relatives scattered around the world outside Europe. And when the underground subsequently brought him answering letters from America and Palestine, any doubts he still might have had of the integrity or judgment of Oskar Schindler vanished.

Some of the less hardy men and women in Schindler's factory died, but the majority continued doggedly at their machines, turning out enamelware for the German army. Schindler and his "inner-office" circle had become taut and apprehensive, wondering just how long they could continue their game of deception. Schindler himself still entertained the local officers but, with the change of tide that followed Stalingrad and the invasion of Italy, tempers were often out of control. A stroke of a pen could send the Jewish workers to Auschwitz and Schindler along with them. The group moved cautiously, increased the bribes to the guards at the camp and the factory, and, with Schindler's smuggled food and medicines, fought for survival. The year 1943 became 1944. Daily, life ended for thousands of Polish Jews. But the Schindlerjuden, to their own surprise, found themselves still alive. [4]

Brnenec - Sudetenland

Schindler's factory at Brněnec in 2004

By the spring of 1944, the German retreat on the Eastern Front was on in earnest. Plaszow and all its sub-camps were ordered emptied. Schindler and his workers had no illusions about what a move to another concentration camp implied. The time had come for Oskar Schindler to play his trump card, a daring gamble that he had devised beforehand.

He went to work on all his drinking companions, on his connections in military and industrial circles in Cracow and in Warsaw. He bribed, cajoled, pleaded, working desperately against time and fighting what everyone assured him was a lost cause. He got on a train and saw people in Berlin. He persisted until someone, somewhere in the hierarchy, perhaps impatient to end the seemingly trifling business, finally gave him the authorization to move a force of 700 men and 300 women from the Plaszow camp into a factory at Brnenec in his native Sudetenland. Most of the other 25,000 men, women, and children at Plaszow were sent to Auschwitz, there to find the same end that several million other Jews had already discovered. But out of the vast calamity, and through the stubborn efforts of Oskar Schindler, a thousand Jews were saved. One thousand half-starved, sick, and almost broken human beings had had a death sentence commuted by a miraculous reprieve.

The move from the Polish factory to the new quarters in Czechoslovakia, it turned out, was not uneventful. One lot of a hundred did go out directly in July, 1944, and arrived at Brnenec safely. Others, however, found their train diverted without warning to the concentration camp of Gross-Rosen, where many were beaten and tortured and where all were forced to stand in even files in the great courtyard, doing absolutely nothing but putting on and taking off their caps in unison all day long. At length Schindler once more proved successful at pulling strings. By early November all of the Schindlerjuden were again united in their new camp.

Until liberation in the spring of 1945 they continued to outwit the Nazis at the game of remaining alive. Ostensibly the new factory was producing parts for V2 bombs, but, actually, the output during those ten months between July and May was absolutely nil.

Jews escaping from the transports then evacuating Auschwitz and the other easternmost camps ahead of the oncoming Russians found haven with no questions asked. Schindler even brazenly requested the Gestapo to send him all intercepted Jewish fugitives: "in the interest," he said, "of continued war production." One hundred additional people were saved in this way, including Jews from Belgium, Holland, and Hungary. "His children" reached the number of nearly 1300.

The Schindlerjuden by now depended on him completely and were fearful in his absence. His compassion and sacrifice were unstinting. He spent every bit of money still left in his possession, and traded his wife's jewelry as well, for food, clothing, and medicine, and for schnapps with which to bribe the many SS investigators. He furnished a secret hospital with stolen and black-market medical equipment, fought epidemics, and once made a 300-mile trip himself carrying two enormous flasks filled with Polish vodka and brought them back full of desperately needed medicine. His wife, Emilie, cooked and cared for the sick.

In the factory, some of the men began turning out false rubber stamps, military travel documents, and the special official papers needed to protect the delivery of food bought illicitly. Nazi uniforms and guns were collected and hidden, along with ammunition and hand grenades, as all eventualities were prepared for. The risks mounted and the tension grew. Schindler, however, seems to have maintained an equilibrium throughout this period that was virtually unshakable. "Perhaps I had become fatalistic," he says now. "Or perhaps I was just afraid of the danger that would come once the men began to lose hope and acted rashly. I had to keep them full of optimism."

Schindler understood "his children" and catered to their fears. Near the factory he had been given a beautifully furnished villa that overlooked the length of the valley where the small Czech village lay. But since the workers always dreaded the SS visits that might come late at night and spell their end, Oskar and Emilie Schindler never spent a single night at the villa, sleeping instead in a small room in the factory itself

When the Jewish workers died they were secretly buried with full rites despite Nazi rulings that their corpses be burned. Religious holidays were observed clandestinely and celebrated with extra rations of black-market food. [5]

The Train

Perhaps the most absorbing of all the legends that Schindlerjuden on four continents repeat is one that graphically illustrates Schindler's self-adopted role of protector and savior in the midst of general and amoral indifference. Just about the time the Nazi empire was crashing down, a phone call from the railway station late one evening asked Schindler whether he cared to accept delivery of two railway cars fall of near-frozen Jews. The cars had been frozen shut at a temperature of 5 degrees fahrenheit and contained almost a hundred sick men who had been locked inside for ten days, ever since the train had been sent off from Auschwitz with orders to deliver the human cargo to some willing factory. But, when informed of the condition of the prisoners, no factory manager would hear of receiving them. "We are not running a sanatorium!" was the usual word. Schindler, sickened by the news, ordered the train sent to his factory siding at once.

Ice had formed on the locks and the cars had to be opened with axes and acetylene torches. Inside, the miserable relics of human beings were stretched out, frozen stiff. Each had to be carried out like a carcass of frozen beef. Thirteen were unmistakably dead, but the others still breathed.

Throughout that night and for many days and nights following, Oskar and Emilie Schindler and a number of the men worked without halt on the frozen and starved skeletons. One large room in the factory was emptied for that purpose. Three more men died, but with the care, the warmth, the milk, and the medicine, the others gradually rallied. All this had been achieved surreptitiously, with the factory guards, as usual, receiving their bribes so as not to inform the SS commandant. The men's convalescence also had to be effected secretly lest they be shot as useless invalids. Later they became part of the factory labor force and joined the others in the motions of feigning war production. [6]

War's End

The arrival of the Russians on May 9 put an end to the constant nightmare. In the early morning, once certain that his workers finally were out of danger and that all was in order to explain to the Russians, Schindler, Emilie, and several of his closest friends among the Jewish workers discreetly disappeared and were not heard from until they turned up, months later, deep in Austria's U.S. Zone. For the Nazis, he had known all the answers. But at the end he had decided that, as an owner of a German slave-labor factory, he would take no chances on Russian troops casually shooting him before finding out the truth of all that had taken place. [7]

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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