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 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.

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.

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. [2]

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

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^[1], 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.

Footnotes

↑ Schindler's grave is located near the bus parking lot near Zion Gate. At the bottom of the ramp leading to the parking lot, across the street is a gate to the graveyard with a small sign indicating the way to his grave. It is on the lowest terrace, to the right of the entrance. The GPS location is UTM 711223 East, 3517126 North (which translates to 31.7701° N 35.23042° E). The grave is easy to spot since it is the only one with many stones piled on top of it, each one placed there as a token of gratitude by one of the people he saved or their loved ones.

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

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[1] Schindler's grave is located near the bus parking lot near Zion Gate. At the bottom of the ramp leading to the parking lot, across the street is a gate to the graveyard with a small sign indicating the way to his grave. It is on the lowest terrace, to the right of the entrance. The GPS location is UTM 711223 East, 3517126 North (which translates to 31.7701° N 35.23042° E). The grave is easy to spot since it is the only one with many stones piled on top of it, each one placed there as a token of gratitude by one of the people he saved or their loved ones.

[1]