Oskar Schindler – An industrialist, a war-profiteer, a German and a member of the Nazi Party. A saviour of over a thousand lives.

The story of Oskar Schindler is one of paradox; a Nazi saving Jews. Whoever heard of such a ridiculous thing? And yet, it is true. And it is one of the most famous stories to come out of the hell of the Second World War. It is a story of unimaginable hardship, terror, uncertainty, panic, hope and desperation. It’s a story that’s centered around row after row of letters typewritten onto a sheaf of notepaper. It’s about luck, chance and amazing fortune. It is almost fantastical, in the truest sense of the word.

Who was Oskar Schindler?

Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist. He was born on the 28th of April, 1908. He married his wife, Emilie, in March of 1928 and eleven years later, joined the German National Socialist Worker’s Partry…the Nazis.

Oskar Schindler; 1946. Photographed with some of the Schindlerjuden. He’s standing on the right, holding his hat in his left hand

Schindler had been a businessman before the outbreak of the Second World War, but never a successful one. During the Depression he started many businesses but for one reason or another, they all went bankrupt. This all changed when Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939, starting the Second World War.

After the Nazi occupation of Poland, Schindler moved East and got involved in the black market. Being a member of the Nazi Party meant that he could mix and mingle with the Gestapo, the S.S. and prominent Nazis in Poland. His connections meant that he was able to purchase an “Aryanised business”…that is to say, a Jewish business that had been turned over to non-Jewish (usually German) businessmen. Schindler eventually found himself as the director of a factory in the Polish city of Krakow which manufactured enamelware cooking equipment, the Deutsche Emaillewarenfabrik. With this factory, Schindler would slowly start to rise, after years of failure.

Schindler and the Jews

Schindler was nothing if not an opportunist. If something good came his way, he jumped at it. When he saw his chance to join a powerful political party, he jumped at it. When he saw his chance to make his fortune in Poland, he jumped at it. When he saw his chance to take over ownership of a Jewish factory, he jumped at it. And when he saw his chance to get cheap labour from the Jews…you bet he jumped on that too. Someone buy this guy a trampoline…

Schindler was completely indifferent to the suffering of the Jews. He didn’t care. Why should he? They were an inferior race and of no interest to him. But…they were cheaper to employ than non-Jews. And always out to save a few Zloty somewhere to make more somewhere else, Schindler started employing them, purely as a cost-cutting measure. Zloty, by the way, is the currency of Poland, although it would’ve been German currency (the Deutschmark) at the time. Jewish Poles were cheap and they were plentiful. Much cheaper than employing non-Jewish Poles, which is where it all started.

The Jews in Schindler’s factory were grateful for their jobs. By the early 1940s, the Nazis were establishing ghettos in Poland where all Jews were forced to live. There was a ghetto in Warsaw, a ghetto in Lodz and you bet…there was a ghetto in Krakow as well. But luckily for Schindler’s workers, his factory was located outside the boundaries fo the ghetto, which meant that they could leave the confines of the ghetto each day and go to work and at the same time, do some black-market trading and buy whateve they needed, sometimes using the goods that they manufactured in the factory for bartering.

Employing the Jews

Schindler was not interested in saving the Jews. He saw them as his workforce. As a way to make money. And if the Jews were taken away, he would lose money. He would have to employ non-Jewish Poles, which would cost him more and lose him more money. If he lost a worker, he would have to train another worker to do the same job, which wasted time, and which lost him more money…the cycle goes on.

But this all changed in 1942.

Starting at the end of May, 1942, Jews in the Krakow Ghetto were being deported to the surrounding death-camps and labour-camps. Belzec and Plazsow respectively. When he witnessed Jews being shot in the streets of Krakow, Schindler suddenly realised how delicate everything was. Over night, he could lose his entire workforce! And he began to feel terrible about what was happening to the Jews, deciding that he had to do something to save them.

Schindler did this the only way he knew how. By getting them to work. Just like you see in Spielberg’s famous movie, passes, work-permits and identity papers were forged on a vast scale. Schindler was doing everything he could, using his position as a member of the Nazi Party, to save as many Jews as he could. He turned writers, musicians, teachers, professors, lawyers, rabbis and other ordinary Polish Jews into…metal-workers, machine-operators, mechanics, welders, riveters, smithies, carpenters…he gave them any kind of tradesman’s job that he could think of, that would mean that they were “essential workers”. To be an “essential worker” meant that your occupation was essential to the German war-effort. To Schindler’s Jews, this was literally a matter of life and death. Thanks to Schindler’s intervention, hundreds of Jews were saved from going to the Belzec Extermination Camp.

Instead, they ended up in Plazsow, the labour camp. Plazsow was no Florida funpark, but it was a damn sight better than Belzec. Schindler even managed to get his Jews segregated from the other labourers in the camp so that they could live amongst themselves and feel safe. Having his own sub-camp for his Jews was essential to Schindler. He impressed on the camp commandant, Amon Goeth, that production would suffer severely if he had to pick his workers out of the thousands of others in the main camp at Plazsow every morning for work! It would be much more convenient for everyone if they had their own camp. Goeth agreed to this. What he didn’t know was that, by having his own camp, Schindler could smuggle food, medicine, clothing and other essential supplies to his Jews to keep them safe and healthy.
Schindler’s enamelware factory in Krakow as it appears today

All the while, Schindler was bribing people left, right and center in order to keep his Jews safe; everyone from Amon Goeth the camp commandant, right down to the guards who patrolled the camp. They were now over a thousand Jews working for Schindler, ranging in ages from children aged ten or younger, all the way up to retired grandparents in their sixties or seventies. Most of them were Polish, although Jews from other countries also found themselves working for Schindler. In some cases, entire families were saved and mothers and fathers worked together in the factory alongside their children. This was largely due to the influence of Stern who deliberately gave jobs to his fellow Jews to save them from the death camps.

Itzhak Stern

Portrayed in the 1993 film by the marvellous Ben Kingsley, Itzhak Stern was Schindler’s Jewish accountant. Stern was responsible for the daily running of many of Schindler’s operations and it was he who helped create all the forged employment papers that would save so many Jews from deportations to death camps, and instead, find them working in the relative safety of Schindler’s enamelware factory. He kept Schindler’s books in order and made sure that everything ran smoothly. He helped Schindler run his black-market operations and the bribes that he would give to other Germans to ensure that his factory and his Jews were kept safe. Together, Schindler and Stern worked the factory, striving to protect the Jews. Hundreds flocked to the enamelware factory, even if they had never worked in a factory in their lives.

Stern and Schindler worked under layer after layer of lies, deceit and deception, all a necessary cover to protect their growing role in saving the Jews of Krakow. Apart from giving ‘non-essential’ Jews the false paperwork to allow them to move out of the ghetto and work in the factory, Stern and Schindler even falsified the factory’s employment books! Employment-lists which had the names of every single worker written on them, were all altered or changed in one way or another. The elderly working within the factory had their dates of birth changed. Instead of being seventy, they were now fifty. Instead of being a librarian, they were now a welder. Children as young as ten suddenly became young men and women in their mid-twenties who instead of being schoolboys and schoolgirls, were suddenly metal-polishers, buffers and grinders. If the Gestapo ever took it upon themselves to examine the books…they would see a perfect German Aryan factory run by a German who employed Jews who were all professionals in their respective fields, even if they’d never picked up a welding-torch, riveting-gun or operated a metal punch-press in their lives.

Schindler’s List

The most famous part of Schindler’s efforts to save the Jews is his LIST. The famous list of over 1,000 ‘Schindlerjuden’ (literally, ‘Schindler’s Jews’), who were supposedly “essential workers” in his factory. Where did the list come from and what is its significance in this story?

The year is 1944. Schindler and Stern are struggling to keep up appearances. Schindler continues to bribe prominent Gestapo and S.S. officers and continues to try and protect his workers from everything that he can, from starvation, disease and brutal mistreatment at the hands of the camp guards and officers in Plazsow, who would visit the factory frequently to torment the workers. Schindler objected vehemently to such treatment. Short of actually showing sympathy to the Jews, he used the cover that the guards constant visits made his workers fearful. This, in turn, effected worker-morale which in turn, effected the factory’s output, which in turn, effected the factory’s contributions to the war-effort and to the overall good of der Vaterland – ‘The Fatherland’ – Germany.

It was around this time that the winds of change started blowing. Labour-camps such as Treblinka, Majdanek and Plazsow were being shut down. Along with the ghettos, they too were being ‘liquidated’, a wonderfully euphamistic term that meant that all the Jews contained within these institutions would be sent directly to the death camps, most likely Auschwitz-Berkinau. Schindler began to realise that time was running out.

Writing the List

It was blatantly clear to Schindler, Stern and every single one of the factory-workers, what would happen. The camp would be liquidated and all the Jews, without exception, would be sent to Auschwitz. Desperate to try anything, Schindler gained control of a German munitions factory. He would move his Jews there. He explained to Goeth that since ‘his Jews’ were already experienced and talented metalworkers, machinists and press-operators, it would make much more sense that he move them to the new factory and camp, instead of sending them off to Auschwitz. If that happened, then Schindler would have to find a whole new labour-force and train them from scratch, about how to operate machines and work metal and polish shell-casings so that they would fit into the cannon-breeches properly and a whole heap of other piddly things. And, it would be disastrous for the Fatherland if production of munitions would fall behind schedule, wouldn’t it?

To ensure that he could keep his Jews, Schindler needed a record of them. He needed documented proof of every single worker under his factory roof. He needed to know their names, ages (real or imagined), professions (again, real or imagined), he had to know their religions and their nationalities. He needed…

A list.

It was this list, every single last letter typed up by Itzhak Stern himself, that saved 1,200 Jewish lives from almost certain death in Auschwitz. Stern’s entry of his own name lists him as:

STERN – Isak – 25.1.01 (date of birth) – Bilanzbuchalter (Accountant).

The significance of the list is that every name on it was listed as an ‘essential worker’ for the German war-effort and therefore would be spared from extermination. Being on the list was literally life or death for hundreds of Schindler’s Jews. As the Schindlerjuden lined up to board the train going to the new camp and factory, they prayed that Stern hadn’t accidently forgotten to include them on the list!

The Schindlerjuden were packed into cattle-cars and transported by train to their new munitions factory in Czechoslovakia. The trains wre all divided up. One held men with their wives and children. Another train held women exclusively. It must’ve been absolute horror to Schindler and his Jews when the womens’ train took a wrong turn and ended up in the very place that everyone dreaded! – Auschwitz! It was only very hasty action and a lot of bribing on Schindler’s part, as well as his personal intervention at Auschwitz, that saved them all from death.

Away from the eyes of the S.S. and the Gestapo, Schindler and his Jews finally found a haven. They lived and worked in the new munitions factory. All of them. Even Schindler and his wife, Emilie. They could have lived in the villa provided for them in the hill overlooking the factory, but Schindler was so terrified of the S.S. bursting into the factory in the middle of the night to cart off his workforce that he never lived there, spending every night in his office.

Life settled into a sort of rhythm now. They would work all day and relax at night. Jewish holidays were observed and time off was given to celebrate them. The Sabbath was observed and work would cease on Sundays. Workers who died in the factory (either through accident, illness or old age…never through the intervention of the factory’s guards) were given traditional Jewish funerals, even though this was illegal under Nazi rule.

But in and amongst all this relative tranquilty and peace, Schindler was still playing games with the Gestapo the S.S. and other Nazis. As Liam Neeson famously said in the film ‘Schindler’s List’ – “If this factory ever makes a shell that can actually be fired, I’ll be a very unhappy man“.

And he was true to his word.

Schindler deliberately sabotaged the German war-effort. Every morning he would wander around the factory, fiddling with the machines. He would remove parts to make them break down. He would recalibrate them and readjust them so that the casings that they made for the shells were just that little bit too big, or too small, so that they wouldn’t fit into the guns they were meant to be fired out of. Screws were missing. Blasting-caps would suddenly not work. He did everything he could to make sure that not a single round of ammunition manufactured by his factory would ever pass quality-control.

The End of the War

Schindler and his Jews had no illusions about what would happen to Schindler and his wife when the War ended. As a Nazi and as a profiteer of slave-labour, as a persecutor of the Jews, he would be hunted by everyone – the Russians, the British, the French, the Americans…he had to escape.

Knowing that Schindler’s chances of survival were slim, the Schindlerjuden banded together. They drafted a letter that they hoped, would explain to any Allied soldiers or to other Jews, who Schindler was and the nature of his work, sparing him from death or imprisonment. This letter, translated into English, may be read here. Schindler even gave a speech to his workers before leaving. He gave the women cloth to make clothes or to sell on the black market. He gave them all a bottle of wine each, again to sell on the black market for badly needed money. He implored on his Jews to resist the temptation to take out revenge-attacks on Nazis and Germans after the end of the War and then, he and his wife fled into the night.

Schindler after the War

For all the good he did during the War, Schindler’s luck never changed. In the 1930s he was a failing businessman. In the 1950s and 60s, he continued to be  failure of a businessman. Every venture he tried led to nothing. He even set up a cement-making factory with the help of his former Jewish workers, but even that petered out to nothing. He died on the 9th of October, 1974 at the age of sixty-six. Schindler’s accountant, and eventually, lifelong friend, Itzhak Stern, died in 1969 at the age of 68.

Schindler’s Grave. It is a Jewish tradition to place a rock on or around a gravestone when paying respects to the deceased

The List Today

Amazingly, Schindler’s List survives to this day. Two copies are known to exist. One was typed up around 1942 and listed all the workers employed in Schindler’s enamelware factory. This one was discovered in 1999. A second list was discovered ten years later. This one is dated April, 1945 and listed all the Jewish workers employed in Schindler’s defective munitions factory. The original texts of Schindler’s List, along with thousands of other Schindler-related documents including photographs, speeches and Schindler’s personal papers, are now preserved in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.

Do you want to read the list? The original German text is here, and a scan of the original 1945 list may be read here. The 1945 list ends at 801 entries, but the true number of people saved is nearly 1,200.