OSKAR SHINDLER

Malajim Ben Yakov

HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSAL

OSKAR SHINDLER

RECALL ON THE LIST

On October 9, 1974, in Hildesheim, Germany; the famous businessman Oskar Schindler, responsible for the famous “Schindler’s List” that saved the lives of 1,200 Jews, dies. Schindler was born in the present-day Czech Republic in 1908, so his original nationality was Austro-Hungarian. His adolescence development was smooth moving to Germany shortly before the outbreak of the 1929.

He worked at various locations until he joined the Abwehr, Hitler’s German military intelligence service in 1936. In 1939 he joined the National Socialist Party and would go on to form one of the many German spies in Poland who would inform Hitler’s regime about the actions of the Polish high commanders.

Product of his activity and the capital he began to own, he soon acquired an enameled handling factory in Krakow where he would hire 1,700 workers, 1,000 of whom were Jews. With the establishment of the Reich’s firmer policy against Jews, their employees were forced to be sent to concentration camps, so Schindler had to bribe German officials at fairly high costs to prevent them from being taken away. When the war began to have major setbacks for Germany in 1944, many concentration camps began to be closed; Schindler convinced the SS captain Amon Göth, commander of the nearby Plaszow concentration camp, to allow him to move his factory to the Sudeten region, preventing their Jewish employees from ending up in concentration camps and a certain death.

Using names obtained by Marcel Goldberg, a Jewish ghetto police officer, Göth’s secretary Mietek Pemper compiled and typed a list with the names of 1,200 Jews who traveled to Brünnlitz in October 1944, escaping certain death as almost all were previously deported. At the end of the war, Schindler’s fortune was diminished to nothing, so that action cost him much of his estate. After the war several Jewish associations would help him recover some of his money until his death in 1974.