Oskar Schindler died on this day in 1974. The businessman now known for saving the lives of 1,200 Jews had been a supporter of the Nazi Party in the 1930s and even served as a spy for them in Czechoslovakia before being arrested in 1938. He moved to Krakow, Poland after Germany invaded and took over several businesses taken from their owners. One of those was an enamel factory that employed Jewish workers. In what would be a turning point for him, in 1942 he stopped the German authorities from deporting some of his workers, saving them from being sent to a death camp. He started communicating with a Jewish aid group based out of Hungary the same year and shared information on the Holocaust with them.
Over the next two years he’d take several actions, both public and private, to prevent the deportation and murder of his workers, including sheltering them when the local Jewish ghetto was destroyed. The act that would make him famous occurred in fall 1944, when he moved another factory to Brünnlitz in the modern Czech Republic, where concentration camp residents had a better chance of survival. His workers went with the factory, and Schindler went with them in part so he could intervene if the Nazi officials moved to harm the laborers.
At that point, it became his mission to deceive officials and protect as many Jews as possible, which he did by providing food and medicine and lying about production figures to keep the authorities unaware. The Schindlers would flee the camp just before the prisoners were liberated in 1945. While his background is complicated, the “Schindler Jews,” in their extreme gratitude for his efforts, began publicizing his rescue efforts not long after the war’s end. When the film “Schindler’s List” came out in 1993, he became known around the world for his acts of generosity.
You can learn more about Schindler on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
