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On Mothers Day I posted Mother Teresa--Mother to the Poorest of the Poor. I decided to do the same sort of thing for Fathers Day, but I had trouble selecting one person to honor. In the end, I went with my heart. My heart led me to Oskar Schindler who was a father protector to Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland.
Born an ethnic German in April of 1908 in what is now Moravia, Schindler grew up as a privileged Catholic. He married Emilie Schindler at age nineteen, but marriage never slowed down his legendary exploits with women. He was a hard drinker with the soul of a gambler, he presided over his family business among other jobs, but when the war broke out he saw opportunities abound.
Schindler was adept at dealing in the black-market and the underworld and was soon fast friends with Gestapo bigwigs who he softened up with women, money and illegal booze. These efforts paid off when he was able to acquire an enamelware factory which he ran with cheap labor: Jews.
Somewhere along the way things changed.
“If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car,” he said later of his wartime actions, “wouldn't you help him?”
Although initially motivated by money, later Schindler began shielding his workers from the brutality of the SS without regard to his personal cost. He would, for instance, claim that certain unskilled workers were essential to the factory.
He once witnessed a raid on the Krakow ghetto where soldiers rounded up Jews for shipment to the concentration camps -- some of whom had been working for him. After that raid, he used his persuasive skills to protect his Schindlerjuden ("Schindler's Jews"), as they came to be called.
Once, says author Eric Silver in The Book of the Just, "Two Gestapo men came to his office and demanded that he hand over a family of five who had bought forged Polish identity papers. 'Three hours after they walked in,' Schindler said, 'two drunk Gestapo men reeled out of my office without their prisoners and without the incriminating documents they had demanded'".
In Oskar's factory, the Jewish workers were treated with civility and were allowed to pray in a minyan daily, and gathered at night to learn Chumash and exchange words of Torah and stories of Gedolim. At the close of Shabbat, the workers gathered for Shalosh Seudos and sang zemirot (Shabbat-table songs), said words of Torah, and told stories of tzaddikim.
As the Red Army drew closer to Auschwitz and other eastern camps, the SS began evacuating their remaining prisoners westward and closing all factories not directly involved with the war effort. Tipped off in advance by Mietek Pemper, Schindler convinced the SS officials to allow him to move his factory and the 1200 Jewish workers to Brunnlitz - thus sparing them from certain death - and to switch his factory production from enamelware to anti-tank grenades. It was at this time that the famous "Schindler's List" was born as Mietek Pemper compiled and typed the list of 1200 Jews to move with Schindler's factory.
Once in Brunnlitz, Schindler gained another former Jewish factory which was to produce hand grenades that would have been useful to the German war effort. It is known that some or all of the output from his factories were deliberately faulty products. Schindler left Brünnlitz only on May 9, 1945, the day that Soviet troops liberated the camp.
Oskar Schindler succeeded in his quest for riches, but by the end of the war he had spent everything he had on keeping more than 1300 Jewish men and women alive.
“He negotiated the salvation of his 1,300 Jews by operating right at the heart of the system using all the tools of the devil—bribery, black marketeering and lies,” said Thomas Keneally, whose book about this paradoxical man was the basis of the movie Schindler's List.
Schindler and his wife, Emilie settled in Regensburg, Germany after the war and later moved to Argentina. In 1957 Oskar moved alone to Germany -- he and Emilie were separated, but not divorced. In 1962 Schindler was honored by Yad Vashem with the title "Righteous Among the Nations" in recognition of his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust at great personal risk. Emilie was similarly honored in 1993.
Oskar Schindler died on October 9, 1974 in Germany, penniless and almost unknown. Many of the Jewish survivors and their descendants financed a transfer of his body for burial in Israel. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council presented a posthumous Medal of Remembrance to Schindler for his extraordinary deeds during the Holocaust and in the cause of Remembrance. His wife, Emilie accepted the medal on his behalf at a ceremony in the Museum.
Jewish Virtual Library: Oskar Schindler
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Wikipedia - Oskar Schindler