#memory
Oskar Schindler.
28 April is the birth anniversary of
Oskar Schindler
( 1908 1974) , a German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party who, aided by his wife and staff, saved the lives of approximately 1100 Jews from the Nazis by employing them in his factories, which supplied the German army during World War II.
During the German invasion and occupation of Poland, Schindler journeyed to Kraków where he secured the lease of a formerly Jewish-owned enamelware factory and commenced production with a small staff. Three months later he had several hundred employees, seven of whom were Jewish. By 1942 nearly half of the workers at the expanded plant were Jewish. (Ostensibly “cheap labour,” Schindler paid their salaries to the SS.)
In 1942 Płaszów work camp opened nearby and it was under the command of the sadistic SS officer Amon Göth. By cultivating his friendship Schindler managed to create a separate camp for his Jewish workers, where they were free of the abuses suffered at Płaszów. Though Schindler’s motivations prior to this point are unclear, many scholars interpret his efforts to extricate his workers from Płaszów as indication that his concern for them was not purely financial.
When in 1944 his factory was decommissioned, Schindler successfully petitioned to have it moved to Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland, close to his hometown. He composed a list of Jewish workers that he deemed essential for the new factory and submitted it for approval to the Jewish labour office. Though those chosen were diverted for a time to other concentration camps, Schindler intervened, ensuring that 700 men and 300 women eventually arrived. They were later joined by 100 more Jews who had been transported from another concentration camp by the Nazis and abandoned in train cars in Brünnlitz. Those who reached the camp spent the remaining months of the war there. A final head count compiled at this time listed 1,098 Jews at the camp.
When the war in Europe ended, Schindler and his wife fled the country with the help of several of the Schindlerjuden, as the Jews he saved came to be known. They settled in Argentina with several of the Jewish families they had saved. There Schindler unsuccessfully attempted to farm. He went bankrupt and spent the rest of his life supported by donations from the Schindlerjuden. He was adopted by the Israeli government and given citizenship,the only former German Nazi to be honoured with such an honour. He died in Israel and a memorial was erected by the grateful people.
Schindler’s story remained largely the province of Holocaust scholars until the publication in 1982 of Schindler’s Ark, a Booker Prize-winning novelization by Thomas Keneally.
The novel, which became a canonical text of Holocaust literature, was later made into a film by Steven Spielberg. The moving film Schindler’s List (1993) received several Oscar awards.
– Joy Kallivayalil.
