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Oskar Schindler was born on
April 28, 1908 at Zwittau/Moravia. His middle-class Catholic family
belonged to the German-speaking community in the Sudetenland. The
young Schindler, who attended German grammar school and studied
engineering, was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father
and take charge of the
family farm-machinery plant.
Some of Schindler’s schoolmates
and childhood neighbors were Jews, but with none of them did he
develop an intimate or lasting friendship. Like most of the
German-speaking youths of the Sudetenland, he subscribed to Konrad
Henlein’s Sudeten German Party and, after the German annexation of
the Sudetenland in 1938, became a formal member of the Nazi party.
Shortly after the outbreak of war
in September 1939, thirty-one-year-old
Schindler showed up in occupied Cracow. The ancient city, home to
some 60,000 Jews and seat of the German occupation administration,
the Generalgouvernement, proved highly attractive to German
entrepreneurs, hoping to capitalize on the misfortunes of the
subjugated country. Naturally cunning and none too scrupulous,
Schindler appeared at first to thrive in these surroundings. In October 1939, he took over a run-down enamelware factory
that had previously belonged to a Jew.
As a result of some deftly-executed, underhanded
maneuvers—in which he acted upon the shrewd commercial advice of a
Polish-Jewish accountant, Isaak Stern—he began to build himself a
fortune. The small concern in Zablocie outside Cracow, which started
producing kitchenware for the German army, began to grow by leaps
and bounds. After only three months it already had a task-force of
some 250 Polish workers, among them seven Jews. By the end of 1942,
it had expanded into a
mammoth enamel and ammunitions production plant, occupying some
45,000 square meters and employing almost 800 men and women. Of
these, 370 were Jews from the Cracow ghetto, which the Germans had
established after they entered the city.
A
hedonist and gambler by nature, Schindler soon adopted a profligate
lifestyle, carousing into the small hours of the night, hobnobbing
with high ranking SS-officers, and philandering with beautiful
Polish women. At the same time, what set him apart from other
war-profiteers, was his humane treatment of his workers, especially
the Jews.
Schindler never developed any
ideologically motivated resistance against the Nazi regime.
However, his growing revulsion and horror at the senseless
brutality of the Nazi persecution of the helpless Jewish population
wrought a curious transformation in the unprincipled opportunist.
Gradually, the egoistic goal of lining his pockets with money took
second place to the all-consuming desire of rescuing as many of his
Jews as he could from the clutches of the Nazi executioners. In the
long run, in his efforts to bring his Jewish workers safely through
the war, he was not only prepared to squander all his money but also
to put his own life on the line.
Schindler’s most effective tool
in this privately conceived rescue campaign was the privileged
status his plant enjoyed as a “business essential to the war
effort” as accorded him by the Military Armaments Inspectorate in
occupied Poland. This not only qualified him to obtain lucrative
military contracts, but also enabled him to draw on Jewish workers
who were under the jurisdiction of the SS. When his Jewish employees
were threatened with deportation to Auschwitz by the SS he could
claim exemptions for them, arguing that their removal would
seriously hamper his efforts to keep up production essential to the
war effort. He did not balk at falsifying the records, listing
children, housewives, and lawyers as expert mechanics and
metalworkers, and, in general, covering up as much as he
could for unqualified or temporarily incapacitated workers.
The Gestapo arrested him several
times and interrogated him on charges of irregularities and of favoring Jews.
However, Schindler would not desist. In 1943, at the invitation of
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, he undertook a
highly risky journey to Budapest, where he met with two
representatives of Hungarian Jewry. He reported to them about the
desperate plight of the Jews in Poland and discussed possible ways
of relief.
In March 1943, the Cracow ghetto
was being liquidated, and all the remaining Jews were being moved to
the forced-labor camp of Plaszow, outside Cracow.
Schindler prevailed upon SS-Haupsturmführer Amon
Goeth, the brutal camp commandant and a personal drinking companion,
to allow him to set up a special sub-camp for his own Jewish workers
at the factory site in Zablocie. There he was better able to keep
the Jews under relatively tolerable conditions, augmenting their
below-subsistence diet with food bought on the black market with his
own money. The factory compound was declared out of bounds for the
SS guards who kept watch over the sub-camp.
In late 1944, Plaszow and all its sub-camps had to be
evacuated in face of the Russian advance. Most of the camp
inmates—more than 20,000 men, women, and children—were sent to
extermination camps. On receiving the order to evacuate, Schindler,
who had approached the
appropriate section in the Supreme Command of the Army (OKW),
managed to obtain official authorization to continue production in a
factory that he and his wife had set up in Brünnlitz, in their
native Sudetenland. The entire work force from Zablocie—to which
were furtively added many new names from the Plaszow camp—was
supposed to move to the new factory site. However, instead of being
brought to Brünnlitz, the 800 men—among them 700 Jews—and
the 300 women on Schindler’s list were diverted to
Gross-Rosen and to Auschwitz, respectively.
When he learned what had happened,
Schindler at first managed to secure the release of the men from the
Gross-Rosen camp. He
then proceeded to send his personal German secretary to Auschwitz to
negotiate the release of the women. The latter managed to obtain the
release of the Jewish women by promising to pay
the Gestapo 7 DM daily pro capita. This is the only recorded
case in the history of the extermination camp that such a large
group of people were allowed to leave alive while the gas chambers
were still in operation.
One of the most remarkable
humanitarian acts performed by the two Schindlers involved the case
of 120 Jewish male prisoners from Goleszow, a sub-camp of Auschwitz.
The men had been working there in a quarry plant that belonged to
the SS-operated company “German Earth and Stone Works.”
With the approach of the Russian front in January 1945, they
were evacuated from Goleszow and transported westward in sealed
cattle-wagons, without food or water. At the end of a seven-day
grueling journey in the dead of winter, the SS guards finally
stationed the two
sealed cattle-cars with their human cargo at the gates of Brunnlitz.
Emilie Schindler was just in time to stop the SS camp commandant
from sending the train back. Schindler, who had rushed back to the
camp from some food-procuring errand outside, barely managed to
convince the commandant that he desperately needed the people who
were locked in the train for work.
When the wagons were finally
forced open, no less than thirteen frozen bodies were discovered
within them. Schindler stood up to the commandant who, in the best
Nazi tradition, planned
to have the unfortunates incinerated in one of the factory’s
ovens. Schindler arranged for them to be buried with full Jewish
religious rites in a plot of land near
the Catholic cemetery, which he had especially bought for
that purpose. The 107 remaining survivors, with terrible frostbite
and frightfully emaciated, had to be medically treated and then
gradually nourished back to life. The Schindlers saw to it that none
of these people was put to work.
In the final days of the war, just before the entry of the Russian
army into Moravia, Schindler managed to smuggle himself back into
Germany, into Allied-controlled territory. The wartime industrial
tycoon was by now penniless. Jewish relief organizations and groups
of survivors supported him modestly over the years, helping finance
his (in the long run, unsuccessful) emigration to South America.
When Schindler visited Israel in 1961, the first of seventeen
visits, he was treated to an overwhelming welcome from 220
enthusiastic survivors. He
continued to live partly in Israel and partly in Germany. After his
death in Hildesheim, Germany, in October 1974,
the mournful survivors brought the remains of their noble
rescuer to Israel to be laid to eternal rest in the Protestant
Cemetery of Jerusalem. Emilie Schindler passed away on October 5,
2001 and is buried in Germany.
On July 18, 1967, Yad Vashem
decided to recognize Oskar Schindler as Righteous Among the Nations.
On June 24, 1993, Yad Vashem decided to reconfirm the
original decision and to extend the recognition also to
Schindler’s wife, Emilie Schindler.
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