Oskar Schindler
Until director Steven Spielberg brought his story to the big screen in the 1993 movie Schindler's List, most people had never heard of Oskar Schindler. Today, Schindler is renowned worldwide for his efforts to protect Jews from German persecution.
Schindler, a Catholic, was born in what is now the Czech Republic in 1908. He held a number of jobs before becoming a sales manager for an electrical products manufacturing company. In the late 1930s, the German government asked Schindler to spy against Poland during his frequent business trips there.
After the German conquest of Poland, Schindler moved to Krakow to run an enamelware factory that primarily employed low-paid Jewish workers. Jews flocked to his factory begging for work because Schindler could use his business connections in the German government to prevent his laborers from being taken to concentration camps. Schindler was both self-serving and compassionate in his efforts to protect his Jewish workers — he was irritated by the fact that Nazi brutality adversely affected his factories' production, but he was also morally repulsed by Germany's anti-Jewish campaign.
In 1943, the Nazis decided to send all the Jews living in the Krakow ghetto to a concentration camp at nearby Plaszow. Schindler managed to save a great many who would otherwise have been doomed by building a camp on his factory grounds and convincing German officials to let his employees stay there.
In 1961, Israel commemorated Schindler's efforts with a memorial that was unveiled on his fifty-third birthday. Germany also rewarded Schindler's efforts with the Cross of Merit in 1966 and a state pension in 1968. Oskar Schindler died in 1974. His story first became widely known as a result of Thomas Keneally's 1982 book Schindler's Ark.
A year later, as Soviet troops approached Krakow, the German government ordered all Jews in both the Plaszow concentration camp and Schindler's company camp sent to Auschwitz for extermination. Schindler used a combination of personal charm, bullying, and bribes to convince the Nazis to let him move his factory (and his workers) to Czechoslovakia instead. He created a registry — the now-famous Schindler's List — of more than 1,000 employees he wanted to accompany him to his new factory. Had Schindler not done so, those individuals almost certainly would have been killed. Schindler and his workers remained in Czechoslovakia until the end of the war.
