 |
|
Oskar
Schindlers answer after Poldek Pfefferberg, another Schindlerjew asked him why
he risked so much
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/265165]
|
QUOTE: There was no choice.
If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car, wouldn't you help him?
[To Poldek Pfefferberg, in response to the question
of why he risked so much, as quoted in "Schindler : Why did he do
it?" (2010) by Louis Bülow]
AUTHOR: Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 –
9 October 1974) was an ethnic German industrialist, German spy, and member of
the Nazi party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware
and ammunitions factories, which were located in what is now Poland and the
Czech Republic respectively. He is the subject of the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark, and the subsequent 1993 film
Schindler's List,
which reflected his life as an opportunist initially motivated by profit who
came to show extraordinary initiative, tenacity, and dedication in order to
save the lives of his Jewish employees.
Schindler grew up in Zwittau, Moravia, and worked
in several trades until he joined the Abwehr, the intelligence service of Nazi
Germany, in 1936. He joined the Nazi Party in 1939. Prior to the German
occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he collected information on railways and
troop movements for the German government. He was arrested for espionage by the
Czech government but was released under the terms of the Munich Agreement in
1938. Schindler continued to collect information for the Nazis, working in
Poland in 1939 before the invasion of Poland at the start of World War II.
In 1939 Schindler obtained an enamelware factory in Kraków, Poland,
which employed around 1,750 workers, of whom a thousand were Jews at the
factory's peak in 1944. His Abwehr connections helped Schindler to protect his
Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps.
Initially Schindler was interested in the money-making potential of the
business. Later he began shielding his workers without regard for the cost. As
time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts
of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.
As Germany began losing the war in July 1944, the Schutzstaffel (SS)
began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and evacuating the
remaining prisoners westward. Many were killed in Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen
concentration camp. Schindler convinced SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth, commandant of the nearby
Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, to allow him to move his factory to Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland, thus sparing his
workers from certain death in the gas chambers. Using names provided by Jewish
Ghetto Police officer Marcel Goldberg, Göth's secretary Mietek Pemper compiled
and typed the list of 1,200 Jews who travelled to Brünnlitz in October 1944.
Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent the slaughter of his
workers until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, by which time he
had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black-market purchases of supplies
for his workers.
Schindler moved to Germany after the war, where he was supported by
assistance payments from Jewish relief organisations. After receiving a partial
reimbursement for his wartime expenses, he moved with his wife to Argentina,
where they took up farming. When he went bankrupt in 1958, Schindler left his
wife and returned to Germany, where he failed at several business ventures and
relied on financial support from Schindlerjuden ("Schindler Jews") –
the people whose lives he had saved during the war. He was named Righteous
Among the Nations by the Israeli government in 1963 and died on 9 October 1974.
No comments:
Post a Comment