Oskar Schindler is most known for his heroism during WWII when he saved hundreds of Jews in Poland and Czechoslovakia from certain death by employing them in his factory. Born in 1908 in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (now modern-day Czech Republic), he was the son of a factory owner and a homemaker. Among his early childhood friends were two sons of a neighborhood Rabbi. His growth into early adulthood coincided with the Hitler/Nazi Party rise to power. In 1935, Schindler was guilty of joining a pro-Nazi group, but more for pragmatic business reasons. After Germany’s invasion into Poland in 1939 (which immediately led to Great Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany), the ever-shrewd businessman arrived in Krakow looking for ways to profit from the conflict. Schindler quickly made friends with key Nazi officers by offering them black-market items such as alcohol and tobacco. He eventually purchased a bankrupt kitchenware factory and employed a Jewish accountant who would become his close friend: Itzhak Stern. He hired Jewish labor and would eventually use his factory to protect the Jews from deportment to the concentration camps. Thanks to the relations he orchestrated early on, he was able to bribe key officers to retain his workers. In early 1944 the announcement came regarding the plans to turn all labor camps into concentration camps, but Schindler was once again successful with his bribes. He would move his factory to Czechoslovakia with his workers and manufacture vital supplies for Hitler’s army. This is when he was asked to produce his infamous list, “Schindler’s Listâ€, of those workers he wanted to take with him. That list contained 1,100 Jews. In the new factory, under Schindler’s leadership, not one useful piece of war equipment was ever produced. He purposefully sabotaged his own products to make sure they failed quality control tests thus thwarting the effort of the Third Reich by at least some measure. When the war finally ended, he had single-handedly saved hundreds of Jews. And they never forgot him. Jewish organizations would financially and spiritually support this “Righteous Gentile†for the rest of his life and he would eventually be buried in Israel at his death in 1974. His services were attended by 500 Schindlerjuden, and thanks to Oskar Schindler, more than six thousand Holocaust survivors and their descendants were alive in the 1990s to tell the remarkable story of “Schindler’s List.”
