This is the true
story of one remarkable man who outwitted the Nazis to save more
Jews from the gas chambers than any other during World War II.
Steven Spielberg turned Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning
biography of Oskar
Schindler into a seven Academy Award-winning film.
It is the story of Oskar Schindler who surfaced from the chaos of
madness, spent millions bribing and paying off the SS and
eventually risked his life to rescue the Schindler-Jews. You may
read the
letter written by his Jews May, 1945.
Oskar Schindler rose to the highest level of
humanity, walked through
the bloody mud of the Holocaust
without soiling his soul, his compassion, his respect for human
life - and gave his Jews a second chance at life. He
miraculously managed to do it and pulled it off by using the very
same talents that made him a war profiteer - his flair for
presentation, bribery, and grand gestures.
Oskar
Schindler
In those years,
millions of Jews died in the Nazi death
camps like Auschwitz, but Schindler's Jews miraculously
survived.
To more than
1200 Jews Oskar Schindler was all that stood between them and
death at the hands of the Nazis.
A man full of flaws like the rest of us - the unlikeliest of all
role models who started by earning millions as a war profiteer and
ended by spending his last pfennig and risking his life to save
his Jews. An ordinary man who even in the worst of circumstances
did extraordinary things, matched by no one. He remained true to
his Jews, the workers he referred to as my children. In the
shadow of Auschwitz
he kept the SS out and everyone alive.
Oskar Schindler and his wife Emilie Schindler were inspiring
evidence of courage and human decency during the Holocaust. Emilie
was not only a strong woman working alongside her husband but a
heroine in her own right. She worked indefatigably to save the
Schindler-Jews - a story to bear witness to goodness, love and
compassion.
Today there are
more than 8,000 descendants of the Schindler-Jews living in US and
Europe, many in Israel. Before the Second World War, the Jewish
population of Poland was 3.5 million. Today there are between 10,000
and 15,000 left.
Oskar Schindler spent millions to protect and save his Jews,
everything he possessed. He died penniless. But he earned the
everlasting gratitude of the Schindler-Jews. Today his name is
known as a household word for courage in a world of brutality - a
hero who saved hundreds of Jews from Hitler's gas chambers.
Schindler died in Hildesheim in Germany October 9, 1974. He
wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. As he said: My children are here
..
- Louis Bülow
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