Born: April 28, 1908 in Zwittau, Czechoslovakia
Died: October 9, 1974 in Frankfurt, Germany
Nationality: German
Occupation: Industrialist
Died: October 9, 1974 in Frankfurt, Germany
Nationality: German
Occupation: Industrialist
Oskar Schindler was born in what is know as the Sudetenland which was home to several million ethnic German families including the Schindler family. This is where Oskar was raised during his childhood and became friends with two sons of a rabbi. Schindler used to work in sales for his father, but when he got married to Ellie in 1928, him and his father never were the same. He left his father's company and became a sales manager for a Moravian electric company. This new business brought Schindler to Poland a lot and the more he went, he found a love for the city of Krakow. In 1935, Germans from the Sudetenland who wanted to avoid being labeled as Communists or Social Democrats joined the Pro-Nazi German party. Oskar was one of the many Germans who joined the Nazi's because it made sense for his business. Within a week since Germany invaded Poland, Schindler was looking for ways to make a profit in Poland from the conflicts. Schindler quickly became friends with the SS guards and the Wehrmacht and he supplied them with black market goods such as cigars and cognac.
During the Fall of 1944, Schindler did everything that he had to do to bring his factory to the town of Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia which isn't far from his hometown. Around 800 men were shipped out in boxcars to Brunnlitz and and so were 300 women and children but they were accidentally shipped to Auschwitz. Schindler made his way down to Auschwitz with a pocketful of diamonds as bribes and told the SS guards that the women and children were necessary for the making of shells for war because they could polish the insides with their fingers. Schindler purposely calibrated the machines wrong so that they never produced a single working shell to sabotage the Nazi's. Schindler was preparing to leave after the war had ended, the workers of his gave him a letter that they had written saying all the good deeds he did in case he needs to defend himself if he gets caught. Additionally, the workers gave him a gold ring inscribed with Hebrew saying a verse from the Talmud, "He who saves a life, it is as if he saved the entire world." Then Schindler fled west to avoid the Russian troops coming from the east.
By 1957, Schindler had gone bankrupt and was relying on the charity of the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith to survive. By 1958, Schindler abandoned his wife and returned to West Germany to live there. He got money from more charities and used it to open a cement business in Frankfurt but it failed in 1961, and from then on he relied off of funds provided by the Schindlerjugend. Shortly after his 54th birthday, Schindler was officially named a "Righteous Gentile" and invited to plant a tree on the Avenue of the Righteous leading up to Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Museum which is a memorial to the Holocaust. Upon his death due to heart and liver problems in 1974, he was granted his request to be buried in Israel. Thanks to Schindler's acts, more than 6 thousand Holocaust survivors and their descendants were alive in the 1990's to spread on the story of "Schindler's List" and the man who was able to make it all happen.