Oscar Schindler Story

This is the true story of a remarkable man who outwitted Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other person during World War II.

It is the story of Oscar Schindler who surfaced from the chaos of madness, spent millions bribing and paying off the SS and eventually risked his life to rescue the Schindler-Jews. You may read the letter written by his Jews in May, 1945.

Oscar Schindler rose to the highest level of humanity, walked through the bloody mud of the Holocaust without soiling his soul, his compassion, his respect for human life -  and gave his Jews a second chance at life. He miraculously managed to do it and pulled it off by using the very same talents that made him a war profiteer - his flair for presentation, bribery, and grand gestures. In those years, millions of Jews died in the Nazi death camps like Auschwitz, but Schindler's Jews miraculously survived.

To more than 1200 Jews Oscar Schindler was all that stood between them and death at the hands of the Nazis. A man full of flaws like the rest of us - the unlikeliest of all role models who started by earning millions as a war profiteer and ended by spending his last penny and risking his life to save his Jews. An ordinary man who even in the worst of circumstances did extraordinary things, matched by no one. He remained true to his Jews, the workers he referred to as my children. In the shadow of Auschwitz he kept the SS out and everyone alive.

Oscar Schindler and his wife Emilie Schindler were inspiring evidence of courage and human decency during the Holocaust. Emilie was not only a strong woman working alongside her husband but a heroine in her own right. She worked indefatigably to save the Schindler-Jews - a story to bear witness to goodness, love and compassion.

Today there are more than 7,000 descendants of the Schindler-Jews living in US and Europe, many in Israel. Before the Second World War, the Jewish population of Poland was 3.5 million. Today there are between 3,000 and 4,000 left.

Oscar Schindler spent millions to protect and save his Jews, everything he possessed. He died penniless. But he earned the everlasting gratitude of the Schindler-Jews. Today his name is known as a household word for courage in a world of brutality - a hero who saved hundreds of Jews from Hitler's gas chambers.

Schindler died in Hildesheim in Germany October 9, 1974. He wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. As he said: My children are here ..

The Life

Oscar Schindler was born on April 28th, 1908, in Zwittau in Czechoslovakia in a home imbued with his parents` deep piety. The nearest neighbours were a Jewish Rabbi family, and the two sons became Oscar`s best friends. The family was one of the richest and most prominent in Zwittau, but as a result of the deep economic depression of the 1930s, the family firm became bankrupt.

Now without employment, Schindler joined the Nazi party, as did many others at that time. It was opportune, when one remembers that the first German divisions invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. Maybe because he had seen possibilities which the war brought in its wake, he followed on the heels of the SS when the Germans invaded Poland.

Oscar Schindler quickly got on good terms with the local Gestapo chiefs. He was a womanisor and heavy drinker, but continually risked his life to save his Schindler Jews from the deathcamps.

Schindler was recruited by the German Intelligence Agency to collect information about Poles and was highly esteemed for his efforts - a fact that was to play a decisive role later in the war for Schindler, when he needed all his contacts.

He left his wife Emilie in Zwittau and moved to Crakow, where he took over a Jewish family`s apartment.  Bribes in the shape of money and illegal black market goods flowed copiously from Schindler and gave him control of a Jewish-owned enameled-goods factory, Deutsch Emailwaren Fabrik, close to the Jewish ghetto, where he principally employed Jewish workers. At this time presumably because they were the cheapest labour ...

But slowly as the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the Jews dawned on Schindler in all its horror - he came to see the Jews not only as cheap labour, but also as mothers, fathers, and children, exposed to ruthless slaughter.

So he decides to risk everything in desperate attempts to save "his" 1200 Schindler Jews from certain death in the hell of the death camps. Thanks to massive bribery and his connections, he gets away with actively protecting his workers.

The SS officer Amon Goeth, the commandant of the Plaszow labor camp, had made the final liquidation of the Crakow ghetto and had experience at three death camps in eastern Poland, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka ...

The conditions of life at Plaszow were made dreadful by Goeth. A prisoner in Plaszow was very lucky if he could survive in this camp more than four weeks. The camp shown in Spielberg's film Schindler's List is the exact description of Plaszow.

Amon Goeth passed his mornings by using his high-powered, scoped rifle to shoot at children playing in the camp - he often would use it as an incentive to work harder. For example, some young men hauling coal were moving too slow for his liking. He shot one of them with his sniper rifle so the rest would hurry up.

Oscar Schindler outwitted Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth. 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 he could have food and medicine smuggled into the barracks with less danger. The guards, of course, were bribed, and Goeth never was to discover it, though Oscar Schinder was arrested twice ...

At the point when his ambitions have been realized and he could walk away from the war a rich man while "his Jews" die in Plaszow and Auschwitz, Oscar Schindler desperately spends every penny he has bribing and paying off Amon Goeth and other Nazi officials to protect and save his Jews. 

In a symbolic reversal of his earlier purpose in life, he spends all the money he made by exploiting the labour of Jews in buying the lives of Jews; whatever is not spent in bribing Goeth and other Nazi officials is subsequently spent in feeding and protecting his Jews.

At his factory, situated by the work camp of Plaszow, Nazi guards are instructed to stay on their side of the fence and nobody is allowed inside the factory without permission from Schindler himself. He spends every night in his office so he can intervene if the Gestapo comes. Twice he is arrested by the Gestapo - but is released, undoubtedly first and foremost because of his many connections.

At his factory, workers are only half as hungry as in other camps - meals at Schindler`s have a calorie count of 2000 as against 900 in other places. When food supplies are critical, Schindler spends great sums of money purchasing food supplies on the black market.

At his factory the old are registered as being 20 years younger, children are registered as adults. Lawyers, doctors and artists are registered as metal workers and mechanics - all so they can survive as essential for the war industry.

At his factory, nobody is hit, nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps like the nearby Auschwitz.

They were protected and saved by Oscar Schindler. In those years, millions of Jews died in Polish camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz, but Schindler`s Jews miraculously survived, to their own surprise, in Plaszow right up to 1944. Schindler bribed the Nazis to get food and better treatment for his Jews during a time when one of the most civilized nations of the world was capable of systematic mass-murder.

When the Nazis were beaten back on the East Front, Plaszow and its satellite camps were dissolved and closed. Schindler had no illusions as to what that would entail. Desperately he exerted his influence on his contacts in the military and industrial circles in Crakow and Warsaw and finally went to Berlin to save his Jews from a certain death. With his life as the stakes, he employed all his powers of persuasion, he bribed uninhibitedly, fought, begged ...

Where no-one would have believed it possible, Schindler succeeded. He was granted permission to move the whole of his factory from Plaszow to Brunnlitz in occupied Czechoslovakia and furthermore, unheard of before, take all his workers with him. In this way, the 1,098 workers who had been written on Schindler`s list in connection with the removal avoided sharing the fate of the other 25,000 men, women and children of Plaszow who were sent without mercy to extermination in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, only 60 kilometers from Plaszow.

Until the liberation of spring, 1945, Oscar Schindler used all means at his disposal to ensure the safety of his Schindler-Jews. He spent every penny he had, and even Emilie Schindler`s jewels were sold, to buy food, clothes, and medicine. He set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie Schindler looked after the sick. Those who did not survive were given a fitting Jewish burial in a hidden graveyard - established and paid for by Schindler.

Later accounts have revealed that Schindler spent something like 4 million German marks keeping his Jews out of the death camps - an enormous sum of money for those times.

Even though the Schindlers had had a large mansion placed at their disposal close to the factory, Oscar Schindler understood the fear which his Jews had of nocturnal visits from the SS. As in Plaszow, Schindler did not spent one single night outside the little office in the factory.

The factory continued to produce shells for the German Wehrmacht for 7 months. In all that time not one usable shell was produced! Not one shell passed the military quality tests. Instead, false military travel passes and ration cards were produced, just as Nazi uniforms, weapons, ammunition and hand-grenades were collected. But still, a tireless Schindler succeeded in these months in persuading the Gestapo to send a further 100 Belgian, Dutch and Hungarian Jews to his factory camp "with regard to the continuing war industry production".

In May, 1945, it was all over. The Russians moved into Brunnlitz. The previous evening, Schindler gathered everyone together in the factory and took a deeply emotional leave of them.

He told them they were free, he was a fugitive."My children, you are saved. Germany has lost the war." He asked that they didn't go into the neighboring houses to rob and plunder. "Prove yourself worthy of the millions of victims among you and refrain from any individual acts of revenge and terror". He announced that three yards of fabric were to be given each prisoner from his warehouse stores as well as a bottle of vodka - which brought a high price on the black market.

At five after midnight -  certain that his Jews finally were out of danger - Oscar Schindler left the factory. "I must leave now", Schindler said, "Auf Wiedersehen".

Oscar Schindler and 1200 Schindler-Jews along with him had survived the horrors of the Holocaust ...

Poldek Pfefferberg, the Schindler Jew who helped Oscar Schindler procure black-market items to bribe Nazi officers with during the war, later told he promised Schindler to tell his story:"You protect us, you save us, you feed us - we survived the Holocaust, the tragedy, the hardship, the sickness, the beatings, the killings! We must tell your story ...."

Schindler`s life after the war was a long series of failures. He tried without success to be a film producer and was deprived of his nationality immediately after the war. Threats from former Nazis meant that he felt insecure in post-war Germany, and he applied for an entry permit to the United States. This was refused as he had been a member of the Nazi party.

After this he fled to Buenos Aires in Argentina with his wife Emilie, his mistress and a dozen Schindler Jews. He settled down in 1949 as a farmer, supported financially by the Jewish organization Joint and thankful Jews, who never forgot him.

But Oscar Schindler met with no success, and in 1957 he became bankrupt and travelled back alone to Europe. He never saw Emilie again ...

Oscar Schindler settled down in at little apartment Am Hauptbahn Nr. 4 in Frankfurt Am Main in West Germany and tried - again with help from the Jewish organization - to establish a cement factory. This was not a success either, and it went bankrupt in 1961. In 1962, after Oscar Schindler was honored by Israel as a Righteous Gentile, his business partner in Germany canceled the partnership saying, ' ... now it is clear that you are a friend of Jews and I will not work together with you any more ...'

And his life was totally dependent on gifts and money from the Jews he saved. His close colleague and friend Poldek Pfefferberg encouraged every single Schindler Jew to donate one day`s pay a year. Another friend Moshe Beijski - also a Schindler Jew - who later became a high court judge in Israel, could lovingly recount how if you sent Schindler 3,000 dollars, he would have spent the money in two to three weeks. And would ring up after that and say that he didn`t have a cent.

Schindler`s clear indictment of German war criminals in the trials after the war nourished the hatred that many in Germany felt for him. He was persecuted, he was sworn at on the streets, and stones were thrown at him.

It was said that he was their bad conscience - the conscience of all those who had known something but done nothing.

Schindler boxed the ears of a factory worker who called him a "Jew kisser", but achieved nothing other than being dragged into court on a count of violence, where the judge gave him a lecture on jurisprudence.

In a letter to one of his Jews, Schindler wrote, "I would have taken my own life, if it would not have given them so much satisfaction ...."

Oscar Schindler was honoured and revered everywhere by his Jews. In Jerusalem a floor of the The Harry S. Truman  Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace was dedicated to Schindler in the beginning of the 1970s for his efforts.

Oscar Schindler died of liver failure in Frankfurt on the 9th of October, 1974, at an age of 66. From 1939 to the day he died he was such in love with his Jewish people, that he wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. Poldek Pfefferberg asked him shortly before he died, why he wanted to be buried here. He answered :"My children are here ....."

In faithful acquiescence with his wishes, his earthly remains were taken to Israel, where his lead coffin was carried through the streets of Jerusalem.

Schindler - to be honest was not one of the most devout sons of the church - was buried in the Catholic churchyard on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, in the presence of hundreds of weeping Schindler Jews.

He was mourned on four continents ...