Titans of History

A womanizing, heavy-drinking war profiteer, Oskar Schindler was responsible for one of history’s greatest acts of selfless heroism. His decision to save over 1000 Jewish slave laborers from death at the hands of the Nazis has been immortalized in literature and film—an act of individual nobility that epitomizes the triumph of humanity over evil. Like Dickens’s sinner-hero Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, Schindler demonstrates that real heroes are often not pious and conventional but worldly rogues, eccentrics and outsiders.

Oskar Schindler was an extravagant and genial businessman from Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He was born into a wealthy family, but his various enterprises were destroyed by the Great Depression that spread through Europe in the 1930s. A wheeler-dealer who excelled at bribery and manipulation, Schindler became one of the first to profit from the Aryanization of German-occupied Poland. In 1939 he took over a Kraków factory from a Jewish industrialist and filled it with Jewish slave labor.

In the late 1930s, sensing which way the political wind was blowing, Schindler had worked for German intelligence—an action that had seen him briefly imprisoned in his native country. When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Schindler, now set free, joined the Nazi Party. His boozy bonhomie earned him a swift rise. But after watching yet another Nazi raid on the Kraków Ghetto, which adjoined his factory, he decided to use his considerable influence to counteract his party’s anti-Semitic policy and to save as many Jews as he could.

The very qualities that made Schindler a successful profiteer enabled him to save his workforce of over 1000 Jews. A consummate actor, Schindler used his charm to deflect his fellow Nazis from sending his Jews to the extermination camps. Gestapo officers arriving at his factory, demanding that he hand over workers with forged papers, would reel drunkenly out of his office three hours later without either workers or their papers. He was arrested twice for procuring black-market supplies for his Jews, but his bribes and his easy manner secured his release. “Whatever it took to save a life, he did,” his lawyer later said. “He worked the system extraordinarily well.”

When 300 of his female workers were sent by administrative error to Auschwitz, Schindler secured their release with a hefty bribe. He forbade anyone, including officials, to enter his factory without his express permission. He spent every night in his office, ready to intervene in case the Gestapo came. As the Nazis retreated and the 25,000-strong population of the nearby labor camp at Plaszów was sent to Auschwitz, Schindler pulled every string to have his factory and all his workers moved to Moravia. Even though he was now himself in danger, he stayed with his Jews until the Russians arrived in May 1945 and he knew that they were safe.

Schindler rarely talked about his motivation. As a child, his best friends had been the sons of a rabbi who lived nearby. “It didn’t mean anything to me that they were Jewish,” he said later when asked why he acted against Nazi policy, “to me they were just human beings.” When pressed to explain his apparent volte-face, his reasoning was astounding in its simplicity: “I believed that the Germans were doing wrong … when they started killing innocent people … I decided I am going to work against them and I am going to save as many as I can.” “I knew the people who worked for me,” he told another. “When you know people, you have to behave toward them like human beings.”

Many are still confounded by why this unlikely hero would sacrifice everything to save these people. But for Schindler, who began saving Jews long before the tide of war had turned, it was simply a matter of conscience. In the words of another man he saved: “I don’t know what his motives were, even though I knew him very well. I asked him and I never got a clear answer … but I don’t give a damn. What’s important is that he saved our lives.”

The opportunistic Schindler ended the war penniless. He spent his vast fortune to protect lives, even selling off his wife’s jewels. His marriage to the long-suffering Emilie finally broke down in 1957. “He gave his Jews everything,” she later said. “And me nothing.” He was shunned in Germany after the war, his actions a constant challenge to the collective self-deception that nothing could have been done. His postwar business ventures flopped. The Jews whom Schindler had saved came to the support of their erstwhile benefactor. A Jewish organization funded his brief, unsuccessful stint as a farmer in Argentina and his short-lived German cement factory. From all over the world the Schindler Jews sent money. He died of liver failure in 1974. He is buried, according to his wishes, in Jerusalem, “because my children are here.”

HOXHA OF ALBANIA

1908–85